HAMBURGER CITY

HAMBURGER CITY

MARTY FISCHHOFF

In this the year of our Bicentennial, the only gift a true patriot should even consider giving is a burger. After all, what's more American than the hamburger? Apple pies? Who's got the time to mess with that? The hot dog? It might be Freudian, but this country definitely prefers patties over wieners between its buns. America was nurtured on the hamburger, and that's no flight of journalistic fancy. I've got facts to back me up.

I did a little research on our friend the hamburger. In 1973, the latest statistics available, the United States slaughtered 34 billion heads of cattle, producing 21 billion pounds of carcass meat and lard. From all this flesh, some 1.5 billion pounds of hamburger were prepared and processed under federal inspection.

Now if I asked you how many burgers this country consumes per person, what would you say? My guess was around two burgers per week, but I seriously underestimated our hamburger hunger. There are 200 million people in the U.S. Divide that into the amount of ground beef produced and you arrive at the fact that each person consumes 75 pounds of hamburger a year, or...ONE BURGER A DAY.

Astounding. A burger a day. It makes you proud to be an American.

Yet does the mighty burger command the respect its numbers deserve? No. Are there any Hamburger Advertising Councils? Any National Burger Festivals? No. Instead of being ashamed of our taste for hamburger, we should learn to exploit it. We should hail the establishments that excel at its, preparation and sponsor world-wide tours for people who want to sample America's contribution to haute cuisine.

With this in mind, I've compiled a buyer's guide to ground beef. The list is not meant solely to judge the best burgers, but to demonstrate the diversity of meals in a bun available.

Top 10 lists, we'll all agree, are presumptuous and arbitrary. So here's our Top 12 hamburgers.

CHECKER BAR, 725 Bates in Detroit:: I might as well start with my personal favorite, the Checker Bar. The Checker's masterpiece is a mammoth hunk of meat consisting of the bar's own blend of beef — a little. ground round, some chuck, a healthy helping of tenderloin. The resulting patty is grilled leisurely until it's juiced up and ready to go inside a giant sesame bun. Such respect does the Checker show for its burgers that it serves them simply and unadorned. The only condiments you'll find are thick slices of Bermuda onions and fresh tomatoes, in season. This is no fast food diner. The meat is allowed to cook slowly, lovingly, without being rushed to its succulent peak of flavor. For such care you must expect to wait. The Checker is centrally located downtown, close enough to city hall, shops and the courts to attract a large, lunchtime following. At noon the line waiting for a table converges with the take-out queue somewhere near the river. The Checker Bar is everybody's secret find.

JOCKBURGER, LinI, dell A.C., 1310

Cass in Detroit :: Too bad the Lindell doesn't advertise. If it did, every athlete in the city would step forward with his personal endorsement. The Lindell is the jock hangout in town. Exploding the myth that celebrities prefer quiet, unknown havens where they can find peace and solitude, sports stars parade their muscles nightly at the Lindell Athletic Club. The daily sports pages will alert you whom to expect on any given night. But asking for autographs is not standard practice. The jocks regard the bar as one place they can lower their wholesome, allAmerican masks and act human. And boy, do they act human. Of all the many legends surrounding the Lindell, the most oft-repeated involve the barroom brawls. Billy Martin once punched out his star pitcher in the back alley. But the Lindell's proudest moment was when Dick the Bruiser took on Alex Karras, owner Jim Butsicaris and half the police force in a Detroit-style death match. From all accounts, the Bruiser was having the better of the match until someone used his skull to crack a billiard cue in half.,

You could try the LindelPs much heralded hamburger. But if you believe that because jocks eat here the food must be of Superbowl quality, you probably have drawers full of sabertoothed razor blades at home and a battered face to go along with them. The Lindell's burger, though overrated, is plentiful and tasty. I'll give it a B plus. The real buy is a side order of fries, only a quarter extra.

HAMBURGERE, The Caucus Club, 150 W. Congress :: The most expensive burger in town? I certainly hope so. If you have to spend over $4.75 for a slab of ground beef, you might as well go ahead and buy the whole cow. But for exactly that amount, you can savor the Caucus Burger Pancho. For the unknowing in our audience, Pancho was for years field marshal of the London Chop House's kitchen, top gun among Detroit eateries. The Chop House and the Caucus . Club are under the same ownership and share the same basic menu. Both localities serve up a whopping patty of ground beef that would make even Ronald MacDonald swear off burgers for a month. It's a staggering nine ounces of tenderloin trim that the restaurants grind themselves and mix with eggs and spices. Over the top goes a generous splash of Pancho sauce, a secret concoction of chili sauce, ketchup and English mustard. The Caucus Club tries to emulate the atmosphere of a private men's club — so much so that at one time women were denied admittance. Times have changed, of course, but the air of subdued masculinity, refined civility and stifling expense has been retained: You can down a burger, a cocktail and a beer here and leave with your wallet $10 thinner. PREPBURGER, Verne's Bierstube, 35 W. Forest, Detroit :: One of the original pub-style bars, tastefully appointed with lots of dark wood, oaken tables and a floor of solid peanut shell, Verne's is Wayne State's entry in the quintessential collegiate tavern competition. The bar is kept almost totally dark so that the professors won't notice truant students, so the students won't notice red-nosed professors and so no one will notice a stray 16-year-old or two. Unfortunately, the narcs (from 13th precinct across the street) keep bumping into each other. As far as ambience goes, Verne's is a talkie. You shouldn't have any compunctions about filling an empty seat at a table and striking up a conversation on Wordsworth, Whitman or "What' cha doing tonight, baby?" For the rich, there's the steerburger, a wellprepared wafer of ground beef which comes with a great condiment tray of onions, pickles, relishes and hot peppers. Hold onto the tray and you can nibble at the peppers all night. PRETZELBURGER, Pretzel Bowl Saloon, 13922 Woodward in Highland Park :: Engineerturned-barkeep George Ansen created this sawdust and oak wood saloon with his own heart and hands. After investing so much sweat and devotion, you can bet he's not going to slight the preparation of his Pretzelburger, the mainstay of this menu.

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It's hard to ruin a burger, yet it's amazing how many bars succeed at doing just that — mainly because they're too lazy to make their own hamburger patties. Ready-made burgers are invariably frozen, so that when cooked the outside becomes hard and crusty before the inside is even pink, or so compressed that all the juices have been forced out. The quality of its burgers is a reliable test of a restaurant's attention to deal and sincerity of purpose. Needless to say, each Pretzelburger is prepared on the premises. Weighing over a third of a pound, it's one of the best burgers in town. George also serves a Blueburger, which has a pocket of bleu cheese inside. As George explains, "We impregnate the hamburger with cheese so that when it's cooked the cheese permeates the meat." But he warns, "You have to be careful when you eat it. The cheese explodes." Sound exciting? In either case, your burger should be accompanied by a frosty boomba of beer. GROUND TEETH, Greene's Restaurant, 13545 W. 7 Mile in Detroit:: Don't say you read if here first. I'll deny any knowledge of the place. Why Greene's is such a local legend is beyond me. The place looks just like a White Tower, and its burger isn't much better. It's a loosely woven, paper-thin patty with so little meat it could qualify as a vegetarian dish. It might be a cut above the usual cheapo burger you get at your typical burger shacks only because — and I'm being generous — if you play "Call to Post", Greene's burger won't rear up and race around a track. This rather unappetizing specimen of hamburger is slapped inside the daintiest of buns and smothered with so much ketchup and mustard that you can't taste it anyway, proving that the chef is not without compassion. For the life of me, I can't understand why Greene's has accrued such a steady and loyal clientele. But people come back here week after week; many of them used to live in the neighborhood and grew up on a Greene's diet. You might like to try

your own assessment of the burger, but don't say you weren't forewarned. NOSTALGIABURGER, Diamond Jim Brady's, 15407 W. 7 Mile in Detroit :: Diamond Jim Brady's, to many people, represents the perfect bar. It has all the necessary ingredients: stiff drinks, good food, a friendly atmosphere. City politicos, U of D students, neighborhood businessmen and suburbanites out for a night on the town all make this bar their home away from home. The red-vested barkeeps and the waitresses are among the most cordial in the city, tolerating, if not savoring, the bar's resident eccentrics. Diamond Jim's burgers are superlative, no question about that. With a bowl of chili as a forespice and Irish coffee as a dessert, they make a mighty fine meal.

The decor is an anomalous admixture of Roaring 20's, Gay 90's and Sophisticated 60's, but never mind that. The bar does manage to recapture the ambience of some bygone era when a being could sneak off to the neighborhood tavern, join (or ignore) other placid souls and get quietly and hopelessly bombed. I hope I've painted a pleasant enough scene so that when I mention the bar's archaic dress code (no T-shirts or tank tops) you won't be too offended.

ROOTIN' TEUTON BURGER, Brauhaus Rathskeller, 112 S. Main in Royal Oak :: Royal Oak may not have a college, but the Brauhaus is definitely its attempt at a campus bar. The facade is an expert replica of the type of authentic German rathskeller you find on any American college campus, and the interior looks like an anthology of college bar motifs. The simulated stained glass windows are illuminated by a series of red, green, yellow and blue lights, creating an effect akin to a garish Christmas display. I guess we can chalk up the hodge-podge to zeal. Though the Brauhaus will never make the pages of Bar Beautiful, it does attract a steady enough clientele of college students and Royal Oak real-worlders to be a roaring success. Gauging the character of the bar is not easy. During the day it might be stone redneck, but it's just as likely to be the meeting place for thfe local Jaycees. At night it alternates between grassy somnolence and libidinal gymnastics. The hamburgers are highly praised in some, quarters, but they strike me as a poor imitation of a Verne's steerburger. The waitresses are not the sunniest individuals you'll ever want to meet; any one would make an ideal Brunhilde in Wagner's Siegfried. SUBURBURGER, Mr. Joe's, 28670 Northwestern in Southfield :: Any bar not associated with a hotel in Southfield deserves attention, and one that's both loose and unassuming ranks as a find. Mr. Joe's is just that to enough people that it qualifies as a prospering enterprise, yet it's rarely overcrowded. Mr. Joe's caters to a straight businessman's crowd during the day, and then does a quick change of clothes to serve an onslaught of suburban youths at night. Mr. Joe's has one star attraction, a burger that's charcoal-broiled over an electric grill. At $1.40 it's not cheap, but you get a full half-pound of groundround. As is also the case with the drinks, what's exorbitant in the inner city is a real steal out in these environs. OLIVEBURGER, BUI Thomas' Halo Burger, 800 S. Saginaw in Flint:: Bill Thomas has a good thing going. Setting up cafeteria-style burger shops in bright, upbeat surroundings, he's managed to corner a good portion of the Flint market that in most cities belongs to the national chains. The Halo Burger, as Bill Thomas has dubbed his specialty, has become something of a tradition in Flint. "Heavenly" is what Bill Thomas calls it. He's entitled to his opinion, but if I were to attribute any angelic qualities to the halo burger it would be less for the delicacy of its flavor and more for the lightness of its net weight. It's like a White Tower burger that's been painstakingly refined over the years and cultivated until it reached its ultimate development, which still makes it something less than ethereal. For some reason, when you order a Halo Burger with all the fixings, it comes topped with olives, a twist which sounds more interesting than it tastes. But Flint eats it up — to such an extent that Bill Thomas has opened two other locations around town. UBIQUITOUS BURGER, McDonald's, Everywhere :: Any burger that makes it into a Woody Allen film can't be ignored. About once a month, cruising past a set of golden arches, I'm struck with an irresistible urge for a Big Mac, an impulse which invariably disappears by the third bite. Still, as everybody knows, McDonald's is a ground head and shoulders above the burger franchises. It never ceases to amaze me that the other corporations will try any technique to compete with McDonald's save one — improving the quality of their hamburger. We did a little research into what standards burger shacks have to meet, discovering that while their sanitary conditions are supervised by the individual counties and their meat is presumably purchased from inspected packing houses, the hamburgers themselves are rarely ever examined. The State only analyzes the meat if they've received a complaint. Of course, a chain should conform to federal or state guidelines if it claims burgers are made from hamburger or ground beef. But who knows for sure? I also learned that there are no regulations specifying what grade of beef these burger combines must use. Therefore, the burger you so happily devour could be ground from utility grade meat, the lowest classification allowable for human consumption. The clear up the matter, I contacted McDonald's and asked what grade beef they use. McDonald's refused to discuss the subject. A cheery thought for all of us who've eaten those 17,000, 000,000 burgers.