Romantic Ideals

I used to have a 1976 Dodge Dart. It was my first car ever and it was an amazing car. It gained me independence, it gave me a warm, dry place to make out with my girlfriend, and it was the best car on the planet. It cost me $250, I drove it for 2 years, and I sold it for $250. It was the stuff of dreams.

I held on to this dream for the better part of 20 years, it was a car I would own again one day because a better car hadn't been built before or since. Last year I had a chance to trade a motorcycle for a 72 Dart. It had a big motor in it, lots of performance "stuff" and I test drove it. I went as far as to say, "yes, I'll give you my motorcycle if you give me your car." For one reason or another the deal fell through and in hindsight, it was an archaic example of what an car was before they were good. Sure, it had lots of horses under the hood, and it probably went fast in a straight line at the expense of liters upon liters of gas. It didn't turn very well. It didn't stop worth a damn. It might have made heat in the winter but your feet would get cold, and things like air conditioning or intermittent wipers, nonexistent on a car of that vintage.

The nostalgia was more powerful than the reality. And reality is that the 1976 Dodge Dart, or any other vintage of Dart, is a mediocre car that handles poorly and uses too much gas.

It might be nostalgia that's clouding my judgement about hamburgers as well. I long for the cheap and delicious diner burger served to me in a booth with a milkshake and fries for something like $6 for the burger. The shake should come in a glass and a stainless mixer cup. The plates should be white and scarred by hundreds of utensils scraping across them. Napkins should be stored in a stainless dispenser on the table. Oh, and the table should be part of a booth. There are a lot of "shoulds" and they "should" all add up to one amazing hamburger experience.

Right?

Right?

Or am I being nostalgic?

So I went to the Truck Stop Cafe for a burger to test this theory.

The Truck Stop Cafe is a hole in the wall restaurant on Clark Drive. It is everything you'd want out of a hole in the wall diner. It has the Naugahyde booths, the worn Arborite tables, the spring loaded napkin dispensers and Heinz ketchup bottle that have undoubtedly been refilled hundreds of times and it's more than probable that there isn't Heinz brand ketchup in the bottles but rather some more affordable knock off. Fair enough, I'm alright with that.

Especially when there were more important questions to be answered.

For instance, do they serve a real vanilla milk shake with the extra in the mixer? The answer: Yes. And it's really good.

But it's hard to screw up a milkshake.

The real question is, what's the burger like?

I ordered a burger with cheese and bacon. The classic. I am a big fan of fried onions on a burger but, like intermittent wipers, I realize that's beyond the mandate of a diner burger so the lack thereof wasn't disappointing.

A burger is a burger is a burger.

Not true.

The Truck Stop Cafe burger is probably about as good a burger as a diner burger ever was. It's easy to make a burger too dry by frying it too long but diners are usually in such a rush to get the food out that there's little opportunity to overcook anything. The burger came quickly, it was juicy, and it had plenty of cheese and bacon on it. But that's about it.

It's not that it was a bad burger. In truth, for under $6 it was pretty decent but I recognized the buns as a local grocery store standard and the patties were thin. The bacon was decent and went a long way towards saving the burger but I found I needed to add a good dose of ketchup to keep things moist and prevent it from becoming a dry, saliva sucking mass of doughiness in my mouth.

Was it any worse than the burgers I longed for? Those romantic ideals of bun packed goodness? Probably not. That's not supposed to be a depressing thought, rather, it's supposed to be a realization that burgers have gotten a lot better. The only reason this burger might not be satisfactory is because it's being compared to many better burgers that have been experienced since. Now I'm left with the challenge of finding those burgers in Vancouver. I know they are out there and I can't wait to find them.

Hamburgers

Ah yes, hamburgers, this ubiquitous menu item. This potentially delicious food that graces most every menu in most every restaurant whether it be a side bar note in a place known for foie gras, or a gas station that had about twenty square feet left over by the windshield wiper display and someone thought it a good idea to sell lunch there. Is it a cop out? Is it something that costs less than, say, steak, and is easy for the high school runts earning a few extra bucks for gas money to not screw up. Anyone can fry up a chunk of ground beef, melt some cheese on it, and slap it on a bun, right? Right? And if that's too much of a challenge then a couple of pieces of bacon will make up for any mistakes made up to that point. Or fried onions.

Truth be told, a good hamburger, and I mean, a delicious piece of juicy ground beef held together by a fresh bun with just the consistency needed to hold the burger together without becoming a soggy mess or be so doughy that the burger is lost in it, that's a hard thing to come by.

Burgers seem so easy on the surface and yet most anyone I ask is challenged by the question, "what's the best burger in Vancouver?" I do have a list and I've tried some of them but for the most part the myth of the small, cheap diner that serves a $6 mind blowing burger doesn't exist. It might have once, but if it's still out there I haven't found it. Yet.

There were two amazing hamburgers in this city. One was the famous SaveOnMeats burger which I managed to experience a handful (pun intended) of times before it disappeared. The meat counters had long since been shut down and cleared out but there were the lunch counter holdouts riding out the remainder of the lease or something and selling just about the best damn burger I've ever had. And good fries too, gilded by fresh oil and chunky enough to hold their heat so they were warm from the first one to the last yet not so big that the inner potato mush overpowered the crispy exterior. The lunch counter eventually shut down and a "new" SaveOnMeats appeared about a year later. I'll visit it as a part of this blog, truth be told I've been there once already.

The loss of SaveOnMeats was tolerable only because to the east was Uncle Henry's where you could get a delicious cheeseburger with handcut fries that, on a scale of 1 to 10, where SaveOnMeats Version1.0 was a 10, Uncle Henry's was a 9.95. The only thing detracting from parallel perfect burgers was Uncle Henry's didn't change their fryer grease as often as they should.

With both of these burger havens gone it's my goal to search this city for something that compares, if that's possible, to the burger perfection that has been lost. I don't know if it's out there but I'm hopeful and willing to look.