Hamburger America (26 page)

Their success is no accident. The secret lies in the mixture of ground beef and other “secret” ingredients. Adding breading to ground beef was popular in the South during the Depression, and I suspect the burger at Phillips may be a vestige of this lost art. I arrived at Phillips before it opened and interrupted Larry’s morning ritual of making the ground beef mixture for the day’s burgers. He actually disappeared behind a closed door and reappeared a few minutes later with rubber gloves and large stainless mixing bowls filled with ground beef. “It’s the same recipe since the ’30s,” Larry said of the secret recipe he purchased with the store in 1989. “I do this every day, sometimes 40 to 50 pounds on Saturdays.”

A burger at Phillips can be ordered as a single one-third pound patty, a double with two quarter-pound patties, or a deluxe half-pound patty. That sounds confusing, but not to the kitchen staff who electronically weigh and portion each ball of ground beef. The balls are pressed on a well-seasoned flattop griddle and served on white buns with only mustard, pickle, and onion. Mayo, ketchup, cheese, and bacon are offered (but unnecessary). The burger is so tasty as is you could eat it with only a bun and emerge contented.

Phillips no longer sells groceries. The business shifted in the ’50s when supermarkets killed the corner store. The décor is pure country store kitsch today—Coke advertising from every decade is represented, as well as old grocer’s scales, saws, and a vintage John Deere bicycle dangling from the ceiling.

You can sit at one of the random tables offered or find an old school desk to enjoy your burger and one of Larry’s homemade fried pies. Look out the window of this 120-year-old building toward the train crossing and savor the sounds of locomotive whistles and the clanking of the active Mississippi Central Railroad rumbling by.

 

 

M
ost people might drive by Town Topic and see a cute old hamburger stand, an icon of the past, or a relic in a rundown neighborhood. Not me. The people who know better see a vibrant keeper of the flame, a lesson to learn from, and a restaurant that knows its place in history. I couldn’t drive by anyhow. Every time I try, I need to stop for a burger.

There are three Town Topics left in Kansas City where there once were seven. Today, only the Broadway location, also known as #3, is open 24 hours. At one point all of the Town Topics were open 24/7, as were many other ten-stool mid-century hamburger joints across America.

When I approached the Town Topic for an interview for this book, I had already been there a few times. The night I chose to visit I hit the jackpot—Bonnie Gooch was at the grill. Bonnie should be defined as a hard-boiled sweetheart. She’s just what you’d want from a short-order
lifer—a woman who takes no crap but takes care of the regulars. “See that guy down there?” she said to me, pointing down the counter to an older man. “He’s been like a daddy to me. I’ve known him since the day I started so I try to take care of him.” With that she slid an unordered slice of lettuce onto his burger and sent it off.

Bonnie started working at the little burger counter in 1965 when she was 13. For the next 23 years she worked the night shift alongside her husband Richard. When he passed away, she switched to the early evening shift. To date she has put in 40 years at the Town Topic. Needless to say, she knows how to make a great hamburger.

The burger at Town Topic is a classic thin patty. Small one-eighth-pound wads of fresh ground 80/20 beef are delivered to the restaurant daily. Bonnie presses the meat thin on the hot, well-seasoned griddle and drops a small handful of shredded onions on the patty. Not unlike the fried onion burgers of El Reno, Oklahoma, these onions are then pressed into the patty as it sizzles on the grill. The result is a tasty combination of griddled beef and caramelized onions.

“Ninety-nine percent order their burgers with onions,” Bonnie told me as she built my double cheeseburger, the most popular burger on the menu. It comes with pickles on a white squishy bun and resembles a burger Popeye’s Wimpy might have eaten—a classic American burger. Bonnie imparts to each burger a sort of nonchalant perfection that is reserved for those who have made short order burgers for decades.

Fortunately, those of us who understand the significance of a counter like Town Topic need not worry about its future. “The city tried to turn this place into a parking lot,” Bonnie’s counter partner Keisha told me, but a grandfather clause spared the restaurant based on its age. “Some people have been coming in here since they were kids,” Bonnie reflected during a lull at the grill. “They just love the place.”

 

 

J
ust before the first edition of this book came out I received some really bad news. A friend had called to say that the 60-year-old burger icon Wheel In Drive-In was closing. The drive-in was featured in my film
Hamburger America
and seemed, at the time, to be invincible.

The vintage diner sat on the busiest corner in Sedalia, Missouri and expansion of the road was going to cut the parking lot in half. “They are putting in a turning lane that will come right up to the window,” former owner John Brandkamp told me. And as you can imagine, it’d be kinda hard to run a drive-in with no parking lot. John had the option to move and start over, but he opted to throw in the towel. With the closing of the restaurant, we all said good-bye to the famous peanut-butter-covered “Guberburger.”

But at the last moment someone stepped in to save the Wheel Inn. Longtime employee Judy Clark offered to move the business down the street and reopen in a defunct video store, and the plan worked. It took 2 months, but moving items piece by piece, Judy and her sisters managed to resurrect the Wheel Inn. The horseshoe counter and the stools made the trip, and even the big wooden wagon wheel that used to sit in the center of the drive-in made it. Judy literally saved the Wheel.

Judy started at the Wheel Inn when she was 14 years old. “I’ve worked here on and off all my life,” she told me. The Keuper family opened and ran the drive-in from 1947 until they leased the business to John Brandkamp in the 1980s. John had worked his way up from washing dishes and was at the Wheel Inn for an astounding 47 years. I guess we can’t really blame him for wanting to retire.

The key to the success of the Wheel Inn may be a burger that they’ve had on the menu forever. The Guberburger starts as a portioned wad of fresh-ground chuck that is scooped into balls daily. The beef balls are pressed thin on the flattop and when the patty is flipped a spoonful of warmed, creamy peanut butter is ladled on top. In theory it sounds disgusting but in reality the burger is perfect. The Wheel Inn offers lettuce, tomato, and mayo on a Guberburger but I like mine plain with extra “guber.” The peanut butter works so well with the burger grease that it actually adds to the complexity of the beefy profile.
Think beef satay and you get the picture. Southeast Asian countries have been putting peanut butter on beef since the 1800s.

Carhop service is long gone at the new Wheel Inn but the place is a lot larger. “We have booths and tables now,” Judy told me. And the original rotating neon Wheel Inn sign is still showing people the way to Guberburgers, but at a location just down the road from where the old one was demolished. The new location is directly across the street from the Missouri State Fairgrounds, and the Wheel Inn stays busy all summer long. Judy was afraid that with the move they’d lose customers. “It’s actually better than we expected,” she says. “People have found us.”

Most of Judy’s sisters work with her at the Wheel Inn as they did at the old location. And the Guberburger is back and safe in the hands of a woman that cared enough to save this drive-in. You could say that it’s business as usual, except that Judy told me quietly, “They say ours are better.”

 

 

I
n the hearts of many Kansas City natives Winstead’s is the only place in the world that serves great hamburgers. Even Kansas City’s own Calvin Trillin, food writer and journalist, once said jokingly about Winstead’s, “Anyone who doesn’t think his hometown has the best hamburger place in the world is a sissy.” More than three decades have passed since Trillin made that statement and almost nothing has changed—Winstead’s still serves one of the best burgers in America.

Gone are the carhops, replaced by a drive-thru in 1989. On my first visit to the vintage time-warp diner I was led to longtime employee Judy Eddingfield. Judy started working at Winstead’s when she was only 16 years old, over 45 years ago. “When I was just a kid my father would take me here for a strawberry shake and a single burger,” she told me. Over the decades her mother, brothers, sisters, and aunts would all work at Winstead’s in some capacity.