A Beautiful Thing

Let's not be snobs here. Hamburgers are far from a high brow item. They are an accessible and reasonably affordable way to produce a portable and easily prepared food item. There have been others and depending on where you live the other forms of quickly made food items may still reign supreme. In New York you'd be eating a slice of pizza, or in San Francisco you'd be eating burritos or fish tacos. In Paris it would be ham and cheese baguette sandwiches. Toronto is home to the widest spread network of hot dog vendor carts in the world. But the award for ubiquity most definitely goes to burgers. With rare exceptions it is the chosen battle ground for the plethora of fast food purveyors on this continent and none of this suggests for a second that a fast food burger is necessarily a bad burger. If anyone should have figured out how to make something nearly perfectly it would be someone who has sold millions or billions of said item.

So Harvey's, what do you have for us?

Made to order is a good start. You'll see burgers half cooking away in anticipation of a burger rush and maybe some fries in the hopper slowly drying out under heat lamps but these are sins you afford a fast food chain because you're more likely to tolerate a slightly less glistening golden french fry than an extra two minutes waiting in line to be fed. The burgers, however, are never under heat lamps or in warming trays which puts Harvey's ahead of a lot of other fast food restaurants and they make each one to order. Sure, other places will, or at least can, do that for you to but it's off in a secret bunker deep in the kitchen behind a wall of beeping stainless steel machines and computer screens relaying complex orders to a small army of pimply faced teens working like ants to bring the ingredients to each order neatly into a small paper bag that will transport it to your car efficiently. You can ask for pickles at other places but at Harvey's you get to play Temporary Restaurant Manager and direct the one lowly worker to put an extra pickle on your burger, or lots of ketchup but just a little mustard. It's a small thing but it's a good thing.

It's a beautiful thing.

The other thing that is great about Harvey's is you can get onion rings with your burger instead of fries. I suppose that's only a big deal if you like onion rings. Or if you've for some dumb reason decided to start reviewing burgers and have eaten more fries than you would normally enjoy over a couple of weeks.

Of course "presentation" suffers a bit in the fast food world.

I guess one of the reasons I've decided to discuss a fast food burger so early in this blog is so others have a frame of reference. If I say I love this burger and you hate it (because you've more likely tried it than a burger from some joint on Granville) you'll get an idea of where I'm coming from.

I like this burger.

Harvey's has it figured out. I've had better burgers, yes, but for consistency, balance of flavours, juiciness, bun consistency, etc, (or "extra etc." if your taste is so inclined) (I mean, who puts "etc" on a burger?) (I suppose it would have easier to just backspace "etc" out of that sentence, but it's important that you know I don't take this too seriously, "etc" is just about the worst descriptor one could put into a review, the onus is on the reviewer to identify specifics, not grand gestures about whatever may or may not be a part of whatever it is being reviewed etc.) oh yeah, burger review, the Harvey's burger is a very pleasant experience. They've nailed the balance between patty and bun and their ingredients are fresh, the cheese is cheesie, and at $8.19 for a classic cheeseburger with onion rings and a drink it isn't outrageously expensive either.

I will point out that they burned my bun a bit. I guess that adds a human element to a big corporate burger making machine. They haven't done it to me before and maybe they'll never do it to me again. If only they knew the pressure they were under to produce a perfect burger for a review they might not have made this mistake this time either. Oh well.