Hamburger America (15 page)

I could smell Powers a block away as I approached old downtown Fort Wayne. Across the street from the beautiful, well-preserved Art Deco burger joint are two stately federal buildings. If you snapped a photo of the corner in black and white it may look identical to one that could have been taken in the ’40s—virtually nothing on this corner has changed.

Onions are the name of the game at Powers. There’ll be no hiding the fact that you grabbed a few sliders here because the deep essence of steam-grilled onions will stick with your clothes for hours after. The bouquet of sweet onion wafts throughout the parking lot the minute you step out of your car.

I was clearly the only non-local regular in the place the first time I visited. Two women ran the place—one named Sarah took orders and served pop and made change while the other managed the tiny, crowded flattop griddle. Country music played and both women sang along and knew every word. Sarah greeted each person that walked in the door by their first name and said, “Bye honey,” as they left.

The classic sliders at Powers are the primary source for the American hamburger. Tiny two-ounce balls of ground beef are grabbed from a pile in a fridge behind a sliding door adjacent to the griddle. The balls are tossed on the griddle and covered with a thick layer of thinly sliced sweet onion. The griddleperson gives the onions a gentle press until the balls of beef are flattened. When the patties are flipped, a potato roll is placed on the burger to steam until soft. A burger with everything comes with cheese and onions. Pickles are available, but as Sarah curtly pointed out, “Only if you ask.” If you require a double, two balls are pressed together to make a larger patty. Several doubles with everything is the way to go.

There is no mistaking the presence of onions on a Powers slider. Even with the double meat, the soft, limp onions made up 50 percent of the burger and ruled the flavor profile. The cheese acts as a sort of glue for the whole glorious mess and the locally made soft potato roll completes the package. As I was thinking about this, a customer walked in an, ordered a bunch with extra onion, which was hard to imagine. As I popped the last bite in my mouth, I placed an order for two more. The fear of walking out of a place like Powers unsated was too much to bear.

All types of folks dine at Powers. Next to me was a tattooed dude with a mohawk and next to him a clean-cut man and his daughter. Harley types and old-timers also occupied stools and nary a word was spoken, just quiet consumption and the dull thwack of onions being pressed into beef.

In the beginning, Powers, like many other burger stands of the day, was open around the clock. Today, Powers has fairly normal hours, opening at 5 a.m. Six days a week. Sarah told me, “We’ll make burgers at 5 a.m. if you want ’em.”

 

 

“T
his place was on the brink of folding,” owner Greg Ehresman told me as I sat at the twisting short-order counter for the first time. Greg would know, because he flipped burgers at the Triple XXX decades before he was an owner. He obviously saw the value in this burger counter at an early age and told me, “I wanted to buy this place when I was seventeen.”

The Triple XXX opened in 1929 as a seasonal root beer stand, or “Thirst Station,” only a few blocks from Purdue University. At one point there were 100 Triple XXX Thirst Stations around the country selling root beer by the mug to a population in the midst of Prohibition. Over the decades the stand morphed into a full-scale diner with carhop service but slipped into decline in the 1970s. Greg’s father Jack Ehresman, who grew up only a block from the restaurant, swept in and saved the iconic hamburger stand in 1980 even though, as Greg put it, “He was not a restaurant guy.” Jack, his wife, Ruth, and son, Greg, decided that the key to their success would be to go back to the old way of making everything by hand—a failsafe measure that has proved to be an enormous success.

The burgers at Triple XXX start as sirloin steaks from a local butcher that are ground daily upstairs in the restaurant and formed into tall “pucks,” not thin patties. The puck is smashed thin with great force by the hand of the grill person just before it hits the hot griddle. As I watched Greg make a burger for me he did something that caught my eye, something I had never seen before in my endless hamburger research: the patty was nonchalantly tossed into a bin of flour before it hit the griddle. Perplexed, I asked him why. Like all great stewards of tradition his only response was, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” The result was predictable and amazing. The flour mixes with the sizzling fat to create an even more pronounced griddle char and flavor.

If you are looking for a hamburger on the extensive menu, you’ll need to search for the “Chop Steak.” A cheeseburger is a Chop Steak with cheese. Skip those, however, and head straight for their signature burgers, all named after All-American football stars from Purdue. One of the most popular is the “Boilermaker Pete,” a triple with cheese and grilled onions served on a toasted, white squishy bun. A triple sounds unmanageable but the proportions are perfect on this beauty, a pure expression of the classic American burger. Wash your burger down with the restaurant’s namesake root beer, still made on premises as it has been for over 75 years.

The Triple XXX is a 24-hour restaurant. That’s right, you can show up at any hour of the day to eat amazing burgers. Students make great use of this feature by filling the place well past 4 a.m. on weekends. “On a football weekend,” Greg told me, “we’ll go through 700 pounds of beef easily.”

Today Greg and his wife, Carrie, run The Triple XXX and stay very busy thanks to a visit by Guy Fieri in 2007. “We saw a 40 percent uptick in business since that show aired,” Greg told me. For a collegetown watering hole surrounded by soulless chains that is music to my ears. Even though the McDonald’s only 100 feet away from the Triple XXX is open 24 hours, Greg confidently told me, “It does not affect business here at all.”

 

 

Y
ou’ll know you are close to Workingman’s Friend when the sweet smell of crude oil fills your car. This unpretentious bar sits across the street from a Marathon oil refinery on the edge of a working-class neighborhood only a few miles from the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Look for the bar with the large vintage Pepsi sign and a façade made almost entirely of glass block.

Expert burger taster from Dallas, Wayne Geyer, alerted me to Workingman’s. He had asked me for a recommendation for a burger in Indianapolis and I told him I didn’t have anything. Put to the challenge, he discovered the double cheeseburger at Workingman’s and scored big. Add to this burger discovery a bar that serves thirty-two-ounce goblets of tap beer in a bare-bones tavern setting and you have a homerun.

Opened in 1918 by Macedonian immigrant Louie Stamatkin as Belmont Lunch, the place mostly served sandwiches and burgers to workers at the nearby B&O Railroad maintenance facility. Louie would run tabs for the workers knowing that they had little money to spend. The workers dubbed Louie the “workingman’s friend” and a name was born. In the late ’40s, Louie passed away and his two sons Carl and Earl assumed ownership of the bar. They changed the name out of respect for their father. They began construction on a new, larger building to replace the converted house that Louie called Belmont Lunch. To avoid shutting down for months, the brothers instead built around the existing structure. During construction, pieces of the old structure were carted out the side door and they were never once closed for business. “They did it to stay open,” Becky Stamatkin told me. Becky is Louie’s granddaughter and the third generation of the Stamatkin family at Workingman’s Friend. She has run the bar and smashed burgers to perfection for over 30 years.

Today, the large, open tavern is a sea of utilitarian red chairs and tables. Sixty feet in length, it boasts one of the longest bars in Indy. The bar sits atop a wall of glass block that is backlit by two tubes of pink neon. Decoration is minimal, and sections of the linoleum flooring have worn through to the concrete. Two non-functioning vintage cigarette machines sit by both doors to the bar as a vestige of the Workingman’s past, not some purchased history for the sake of kitchy decor.

“99.9 percent order the double cheeseburger,” Becky told me. And there’s a good reason for that—it’s amazing. Becky takes two balls of fresh ground 80/20 chuck and smashes them super-thin on the nearly half-century-old flattop griddle. The burger cooks through but stays moist and the edges become lacey and crisp. The double is served on a toasted, white squishy bun with a third bun inserted to separate the two patties. If you ask for everything, your double will come with shredded lettuce, sliced tomato, raw onion, and mayonnaise with pickle slices on the side. The grease, cheese, and mayo worked well with the beef, and I asked Becky if there was more than just mayo between the buns. She told me with a wink, “It’s only mayo, but I tell people it’s a special sauce.”

The double cheeseburger is a sight to behold. The floppy edges of the smashed-thin burger hang far outside the bun, making this beast seem unmanageable. Fortunately the entire package is quite manageable. The patties each weigh in at around a quarter pound but Becky could not confirm this. “Ah, I don’t know how big they are,” she confessed. “I’ve been doing this for so long that I don’t know anymore. I make balls of beef, then I smash them.” Whatever the size, it’s perfect.

One thing at the bar that is almost unmanageable is the beer. If you like your tap beer large, then don’t miss the thirty-two-ounce “Frosty Fish Bowl.” Bartender Terry, Becky’s half-brother, pulls a heavy goblet out of a freezer behind the bar and fills it with ice cold Budweiser or Bud Light. That’s a lot of beer and it’s almost hard to heft when the glass is full. If you don’t want to look like a Medieval king at a banquet with this ridiculously large goblet, go for the smaller sixteen- or ten-ounce sizes.

On a diet? Workingman’s Friend offers a burger called the “Diet Special” that sounds crazy but good. Becky cooks a large hand-pattied burger on the flattop (not smashed) and serves it on a plate with lettuce, grilled onions, pickles, cottage cheese, and no bun. “We sell maybe two a week,” Becky told me. But hey, you didn’t come in here because you are on a diet.