He reports on each place so vividly it’s as if you were there, smelling searing meat and hearing the familiar sounds of the cook calling out orders.

I will first admit to all of you that I am a vegetarian and have been for 5 years. The last authentic hamburger I ate was sometime in the year 2000. Never has this been a conflict in my writing and I still think it is not.

Before I was a vegetarian, I was a cook. I loved cooking and still do. I’ll cook anything for anyone, regardless of whether I would eat it. This is why I found the book “Hamburger America” so enticing.

In the book, documentary filmmaker George Motz chronicles the top 100 hamburger joints in the nation. Motz, a hamburger aficionado, produced an award-winning documentary by the same name. He lives for burgers and it shows in the book.

It’s a rather interesting (and mouth watering) read. He reports on each place so vividly it’s as if you were there, smelling searing meat and hearing the cook calling out orders.

This book is the history book, so to speak, of America’s favorite sandwich. It celebrates the simple food and the people that put their heart and soul into making it.

The book doesn’t cover fancy hamburgers; it’s about the burgers that regular people eat on a regular basis. They are the burger joints near factories, colleges and stadiums. Each day hundreds, if not thousands, of burgers are sold to hungry patrons. They all have this classic feel about them.

Many of the places covered in the book are over 60 years old. The more impressive fact is that the burgers at these places haven’t changed in all those years. Most use the same grills, griddles and even fryer grease that they have used since they opened.

Motz has really scoured the nation looking for these burgers. He finds them in diners, drive-ins, restaurants, taverns, shacks, stands and pretty much anywhere else that you would or would not expect to find a good hamburger. He describes each place and its uniqueness, from the diners and their u-shaped counters and paper-cone cup holders to the small shacks on beaches that serve their sunburned surfers.

While organizing this book, Motz was able to meet the people behind the burgers. These people aren’t chefs in stuffy white coats making food meant to be eaten in many courses, they are an old cook in a grease-stained shirt who tells tales about when his grandfather first opened the joint, refusing to move it when the city rezoned the block. They hold fast to their traditions, as they do to their families’ recipes.

Motz even stops at four places in Wisconsin. If anyone grew up in Madison or near there, there is a fair chance that you’ve eaten at Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry, run by Jeff Stanley (as Motz’s borrows, the “king of burgers”). And just up the road from us here on the East Side, Solly’s, which serves “original” butter-burgers – burgers so dripping with butter that they built a heart hospital just down the road.

It’s been said by the culinary world that America lacks its own distinctive cuisine, and for the most part I would say that they are right. We really haven’t invented a food that has become popular over the entire nation. What we have done, though, is perfected food like the hamburger and changed it like no one else has.

Motz will be appearing in Milwaukee on May 10 to discuss burgers and everything that goes along with them at Schwartz Books on Oakland Avenue.

> Comments