by George Motz
The burgers at Crabill’s are cooked in a wide, shallow griddle. The griddle is filled with about a half inch of grease. “The griddle in the old place was much smaller,” Andy told me, and showed me with his hands only a foot apart. “It was also much deeper.” Small balls of fresh ground beef are tossed into the grease, then pressed once with specially made spatulas. The grillperson uses two of these spatulas at a time to systematically press and flip the dozens of patties floating in the grease with a sort of Benihana-like speed and dexterity. As your burger nears doneness, it gets a splash of grease from a spatula and is transferred to a waiting tiny Wonder bun.
Chopped raw onion, spicy mustard, and relish are standard, but cheese and ketchup are also available. There is a sign on the wall menu that explains that ketchup was introduced in 1990. That’s right, it took ketchup 63 years to be accepted at Crabill’s.
On a busy Saturday Crabill’s can move up to 300 burgers in ten minutes. When someone walks in with an order for 20 doubles, the griddle is quickly filled with the balls of meat and the spatulas start whacking at lighting speed.
Don’t waste your time with singles; go for doubles. Twice the beef, twice the grease, and half the bread. If you are feeling brave, do what some regulars do—ask for yours dipped and you’ll get the top of your bun dipped in the grease. “Some people even like theirs double-dipped,” Andy told me. “That’s where we dip the top and bottom of the bun.” A double, double-dipped anyone?
GAHANNA GRILL
82 GRANVILLE ST | GAHANNA, OH 43230
614-476-9017 | WWW.GAHANNAGRILL.COM
MON–SAT 11 AM–10:30 PM | SUN NOON–8:30 PM
“This used to be all farm fields out here,” owner of the Gahanna Grill Jimmy Staravecka told me, waving his arm. He pointed to a photo that shows the bar in 1900, not surrounded by much of anything. Looking at the restaurant today in this busy suburb of Columbus, it’s hard to imagine its former surroundings. No one seems to know the age of the building, but supposedly the business dates back to the days of mud streets and horse-drawn carriages. This means the tavern has been pouring drinks for well over a century and makes the Gahanna Grill one of the oldest restaurants in the area.
The nondescript exterior of the tavern yields to a comfortable interior. The wood-paneled walls are covered with photos of the tavern’s past (one depicting the former Gahanna Lanes, a bowling alley on the premises) and the large bar is surrounded by televisions. The surface of the bar is a potpourri of advertisements for local services—from real estate to a hair salon—laminated directly into the finish. One corner of the bar is dedicated to the Beanie Burger Hall of Fame. Floor-to-ceiling photographs show the brave souls who have ingested the burger that has made the Gahanna famous—the “Double Beanie Burger.”
The regular Beanie Burger itself is a monster, with its patty of fresh ground beef weighing in at about half a pound. The Double gives you two half-pound patties, a photo on the wall, and a free T-shirt for your efforts. But the Beanie Burger, named after the cook who invented it decades ago, does not just contain a perfectly griddled patty. The burger is also piled high with lettuce, tomato, grilled onions, bacon, cheese, and a hearty scoop of homemade coleslaw. The burger is a sloppy, tasty mess that is barely contained by its toasted, soft kaiser roll. For that reason, the kitchen staff takes great pride in stabbing the vertical burger with a large steak knife. I know of no frilly toothpick that could keep this beast together.
Beanie Vesner still mans the grill and turns out hundreds of burgers for the lunchtime crowd consisting mostly of construction workers and faithful regulars. Jim Ellison, a friend who alerted me to this hamburger destination, calls the Beanie Burger “A good, manly lunch,” referring to the nearly 100 percent male population at noon. “Dinnertime is different, mostly families,” Jimmy, the newest owner of the restaurant, told me. “This used to be mainly a lunch crowd with the bar busy at night.” Since he purchased Gahanna in 2005 he has updated the kitchen and added steaks and pastas to the menu.
I asked Beanie how long he had been making burgers at Gahanna and he refused to give me a straight answer. Smiling, with a toothpick in his mouth, he told me, “Maybe 20 years, maybe?” But by other accounts, the figure is more like 30 years.
To make the burger, Beanie grabs a half-pound wad of ground beef measured by hand and presses it flat, also by hand, onto the hot griddle. The burger is flipped once and a bacon weight is placed on top. I asked him how he knew the burger was a half pound and his deadpan response was, “Because I’ve made up probably about three million of them.” I ordered my Beanie Burger cooked to the chef’s specs and ended up with a medium-well, but moist, burger. Beanie told me later, with a shrug, “Most people around here like their burgers well done.”
Jimmy is far from the typical Midwesterner or Ohio native. That’s because he was born in Albania and lived in Brooklyn, New York, for 17 years. He attended cooking school in New York City, owned a pizza parlor, and for a few years was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s chef at Gracie Mansion. He came to Columbus for opportunity and the quality of life it promised. “In Bensonhurst, we lived in a studio apartment on the sixteenth floor. Here, I live in a mansion, wife, two kids, two-car garage, backyard, and a pool.” All that, and he owns a restaurant that makes one of the best burgers in America.
HAMBURGER WAGON
12 EAST CENTRAL AVE | MIAMISBURG, OH 45342
937-847-2442 | WWW.HAMBURGERWAGON.COM
MON–SAT 10:30 AM–7 PM | SUN 11 AM–7 PM
Every day of the year two dedicated employees of the Hamburger Wagon open a small garage door and drag a tiny spoked-wheel lunch cart 50 feet to a spot across the street. “It’s pretty awkward to pull,” an employee told me once, “but if you get a running start it’s okay.” The wagon has been selling burgers in roughly the same spot for almost 100 years to faithful regulars from the center of this picturesque town south of Dayton. I asked former owner Michelle Lyons if the Hamburger Wagon would be around for a while and she told me, “I think there would be civil unrest if they tried to get rid of the wagon.”
Born of necessity, the Hamburger Wagon was started by Sherman “Cocky” Porter just after the devastating Dayton Flood of 1913. Miamisburg was evacuated and in shambles, left without power or water. Cocky served burgers from a cart to relief workers and locals who were put to the task of rebuilding the town.
Today, the Wagon still sells the one thing it has sold for almost a century—hamburgers. It’s as basic as you can get. The burger comes one way only, on a bun with pickle and onion, no cheese. You can always tell when someone in line has never been to the wagon when they ask for cheese. Various cranky old men have owned and worked on the Wagon through the decades and Michelle told me, “If you asked for cheese, they’d tell you, ‘If you want cheese, get yer ass over to the McDonald’s!’”
The small patties, around three ounces apiece, come as singles or doubles on tiny Wonder buns. Chips and pop are offered, but that’s about it. If you were looking for variety, you came to the wrong place. If you were looking for one of the tastiest burgers in America, dig in.
The burgers at the Wagon are unique. The first thing you’ll notice upon first bite is the extraordinarily crunchy exterior and the pleasantly moist interior. Think chicken-fried burger. You also probably watched your burger being deep-fried in the enormous skillet through one of the Wagon’s windows. The reason for the super-crunch of the burgers is kept secret, but I’d venture to guess that one of the ingredients is some sort of breading. Adding bread to ground beef was a government-sanctioned method for stretching food during the Depression. It’s a method that a few old-time burger stands in America still operate successfully with.
An average order at the wagon is four burgers. A customer of over 60 years named Glenn makes the 40-mile round trip twice a week for four of the tasty deep-fried burgers. One day when I was there he added a Diet Coke to his order. Rubbing his belly, he told me, laughing, “I’m watching my figure!”
Two empl
oyees work at lightning speed to prep, cook, and bag over 200 burgers an hour. One stands at the skillet managing the tiny bobbing and bubbling patties while the other preps buns and makes change. This sounds entirely ordinary except that it is accomplished in a space that is no more than four by five feet wide. The illusion of the small cart is perpetuated though by a large commercial kitchen across the street where the meat, onions, and buns are prepped and stored.
New owner Jack Sperry bought the Hamburger Wagon in 2007 and changed virtually nothing, except that now the Wagon is open year round. Jack told me, “Unless there’s a 10 foot snow drift we’re dragging out the Wagon.” This is a big change from the previous owners who would close down for the month of February much to the dismay of the regulars.
Jack is also working on building a second wagon that he can send out to fairs and festivals. Even though the new wagon will have the same menu, it’ll be twice the size and totally tricked out. Jack explained, “It’ll be like the Hamburger Wagon on steroids.”
JOHNNIE’S TAVERN
3503 TRABUE RD | COLUMBUS, OH 43204
614-488-0110 | MON–SAT 11 AM–10 PM
CLOSED SUNDAY
On my first visit to this semi-suburban burger destination I was invited into the kitchen to interview the chef and I was sort of shocked by what I found. Although Johnnie’s is a tiny out of the way tavern they do manage to crank out a ton of burgers during the lunch hour and all of those burgers are prepped, cooked, cheesed, and placed on buns by the one-man hamburger machine Joe Lombardi.
“When I get real backed up it can take me a while,” the twenty something fourth-generation Lombardi told me. “I’m alone back here.” As he jumped from griddle to prep surface and back again with lightning speed, the band Phish poured out of a beat-up boom box. The only other employee during lunch, the bubbly server/bartender Brittney, burst into the kitchen with the next large order of burgers and announced, “You’re gonna HATE this order.” The order contained about nine burgers, all with different types of cheese and different toppings, not to mention that the order was hard to read. When I asked why she thought Joe would hate the order she told me, “Just because it’s a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.”
Joe’s grandfather, Dominic, opened the comfortable, broken-in bar in 1948 by turning his family’s local grocery store into a tavern. Joe’s great-grandfather emigrated from Italy to open the grocery store around the turn of the century. Johnnie’s sits near a busy freight rail crossing in the old-world Italian neighborhood of San Margherita, an attractive spot to Italian immigrants at the time due to its proximity to a large, nearby marble quarry.
As I stood talking to Joe in the kitchen at Johnnie’s, I saw him reach somewhere and toss what looked like perfectly pressed frozen burger patties on the griddle. My heart sank and I shouted out in disbelief, “Are your burgers frozen?” Fortunately, my trip to Johnnie’s was not in vain and Joe explained with a chuckle, “No, that’s fried bologna.” The fried bologna, which is clearly linked to the strong Ohio roots in European sausage making, is a local central Ohio favorite.
The “Super Burgers” are the only burger on the menu and they come in one size—huge. Every morning Joe and other family members hand-patty enough burgers for lunch and dinner. Joe told me, “I usually don’t weigh them but they are around a pound.” These burgers are beasts and after cooking they are still just north of three-fourths-pound. The fresh-ground chuck comes from two local sources and blended in the kitchen. Why two sources? “That’s just the way it’s always been done,” Joe told me with a straight face. I love those answers.
A burger with everything comes on a seeded, white squishy bun with your choice of cheese (six to choose from), raw onion, a slice of tomato, and lettuce. The regular’s cheese of choice is Pepper Jack, which has a decent kick and is the perfect cheese for the Super Burger. Fried onions are also available, but you’ll have to ask for them.
On my first weekday visit to Johnnie’s, the place was full by 11:30 a.m. and there were beers on every table. A pool table dominates the dining area, leaving only enough room for about 28 hungry patrons. The bar is also an option with its 13 stools but a wait seems inevitable after 11:45. On one wall is a poster of grandpa Dominic standing at the bar, a mug of beer in front of him with a strange contraption protruding. I asked local friend and burger expert Jim Ellison about the beer and he explained that more than once Johnnie’s has been awarded the “Coldest Tap Beer in Columbus.” The thing sticking out of the beer? A thermometer.
People who love Johnnie’s really love the place. A guy in the booth next to me announced, unprovoked, “I’ve been coming here for 25 years.” That’s the kind of burger-love I’m looking for across America. Jim pointed out that for most people who live in Columbus a trip to Johnnie’s is not serendipitous because it’s way out by itself in a quiet part of town surrounded by homes with perfectly trimmed lawns. “If you are coming here you are making a choice to be here.”
Joe plans to keep Johnnie’s in the family and eventually buy the place from his dad. When his dad asked him to step into the business, Joe told me, “I took about a month to decide.” Let’s hope a Lombardi runs this American icon for at least another four generations.
KEWPEE
111 NORTH ELIZABETH ST | LIMA, OH 45801
419-228-1778 | MON–THU 5 AM–10 PM
FRI & SAT 5 AM–MIDNIGHT | SUN 3 PM-10 PM
In the center of Lima, Ohio, sits a slice of Americana that is impossible to ignore. A well preserved Art-Deco restaurant with a big history, this 1920s hamburger tradition once existed throughout the Upper Midwest with over 200 locations that competed with White Castle and outlived White Tower. Today there are only six Kewpees remaining, and of those, three are in Lima.
Owner Harry Shutt hasn’t done much to his enameled-brick burger restaurant that was built in 1938 (and replaced a version built in 1928). “We have tried to maintain our image and not change much.” That’s a good thing because this Kewpee has been turning out tasty square-patty burgers for over 80 years.
Yes, the burgers at Kewpee are square, not round. Sound familiar? In 1969, Dave Thomas, the founder of the ubiquitous Wendy’s chain, introduced a square burger to America. It may have been a new concept to some, but both Kewpee and White Castle have been serving square burgers since the 1920s. Dave was clearly influenced by the local Kewpee in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. But unlike both White Castle and Wendy’s, the burgers at Kewpee are made from fresh ground beef, not frozen.
Step into the Kewpee of downtown Lima and instantly step back in time. Very little has changed from the food to the 1930s fast-food décor. The restaurant’s original curved white enamel steel wall and ceiling panels look as clean as if it were opening day. Newish orange plastic booths, a low counter with stools, and random tables fill the small terrazzo-floored restaurant. In the dining area two large Kewpee dolls stand watch over customers enjoying their burgers and thick shakes. Fortunately, Harry has held on to these icons of a forgotten age and has even had the priceless dolls refurbished recently. The Kewpee name comes from the popular early twentieth–century doll of the same name (but different spelling), the Kewpie doll.
The burgers are fresh. “I buy boneless carcass beef and grind it here,” Harry told me. The beef comes from a Lima slaughterhouse that uses local cows only. Harry said it best when he explained, “The worst thing you can do to meat is haul it. These animals have never been more than 40 miles from Lima.” This makes Harry and Kewpee an anomaly in fast-food America. The hamburger über-chains today, with their cross-country shipments and city-sized warehouses, could not even begin to imagine this sort of localized business plan.
Two separate griddles work full-time during the lunch rush; one services the drive-thru and the other walk-up customers inside. All of the women working behind the counter slinging patties and dressing burgers have been at the Kewpee for over 30 years. Amazingly, grill cook Nancy has been employed at Kewpee since the Kennedy administration.
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nbsp; The burgers are super-thin and so fresh they are almost falling apart. The usual condiments like mustard, ketchup, and pickle are available, but most order “The Special,” which is a burger with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato. The produce for Kewpee comes from a local farmer and is hydroponically grown. One menu item, the vegetable sandwich, appears to be a late addition for a health-conscious America, but this is not the case. On the menu for decades, the sandwich was probably added during World War II to make up for the lack of available burger meat. “We’ve had a vegetable sandwich for over 70 years,” Harry pointed out. Harry has been at Kewpee for over 50 years and owns the rights to the franchise, as well as two other “contemporary” Kewpees in Lima. He started flipping burgers at the downtown Kewpee when he was 25 and became the owner in 1980. Harry has a lot to say about the “Wal-Marting” of America. He feels the crush of commercial fast food and the lack of support for small business in America. Coincidentally, one of his Kewpees is threatened by highway expansion designed to accommodate . . . a new Wal-Mart! Regardless, Kewpee does a brisk business and is hardly fazed by the seven McDonald’s restaurants in Lima.
You owe it to yourself to visit Kewpee. It’s a part of American hamburger tradition that remains vital in the face of a homogenizing fast-food culture. Pay homage to a burger chain that preceded Burger King and Wendy’s by almost 40 years. Look for the wide-eyed smiling Kewpee doll over the front door and remember the Kewpee slogan, “Hamburg pickle on top makes your heart go flippity-flop.”
THE SPOT
201 SOUTH OHIO AVE | SIDNEY, OH 45365
937-492-9899 | WWW.THESPOTTOEAT.COM