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.