Although it'd be a cool name for a burger joint, International House of Hamburgers is a play, written by Cliff Hershman and directed by Chris Johnston, currently running at the Bang and Clatter Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, until November 22. Although their website only describes the play as, "A dark, comedic tale about doing your job as if your life depended on it!" this less than favorable review from Chuck Yarborough of The Plain Dealer gives a bit more information, mostly in the form of burger-related puns. It seems like the most fun Yarborough got out of seeing the play was being able to compare it to a burger:
The preview performance stumbled as scenes seemed to slide from medium rare to well done to overdone. McNally's Matthew in particular seemed more ham than burger. Though he had moments of conveying angst, for the most part it felt like he was tofu in a part that needed beef. Loud is not the same as intense.
There's no mention of real burgers being given to the audience, but there is a grill that "fills the air with the scent of grilling burgers." Tickets are $15 or "pay-as-you-go" for students and seniors.
Liz of Cincinnati-based blog Get In Mah Belly says that Terry's Turf Club makes the best burger she's ever eaten in the city. The burgers use with buttered, toasted buns and toppings including bacon, goat cheese, and...lump crab meat? (It's a "turf club" after all.) Specifically, she and a friend ordered one burger topped with lump crab meat, bacon, and béarnaise sauce, and another topped with bacon, goat cheese, grilled onions, and burgundy wine/mushroom/truffle sauce. Unsurprisingly, they were unable to finish the fries, but Liz says they were also delicious. 4618 Eastern Avenue, Cincinnati OH 45226 (map); 513-533-4222
Editor's note: Burgermeisters! Here's another excerpt from George Motz's book Hamburger America. George and his publisher were kind enough to allow us to run them here, along with George's beautiful photos. We'll be running one every other week. Eat up!
Crabill's is very, very small. What’s amazing is that the original Crabill's was much smaller. Eight stools sit bolted to the floor at a small counter and there is barely enough room to pass behind them. "The old place was five times smaller," grill cook Andy Hiltibran told me.
The first time I visited Crabill's I sat next to a white-bearded regular named Will Yoder who, for decades, plays the annual town Santa. Will had recently had his teeth removed and was on a soft food diet. Personally, I couldn’t think of a better spot to dine on tasty, soft food. The tiny burgers at Crabill’s, with their pillowy Wonder buns and healthy dose of burger grease, actually do melt in your mouth.
For $1, you could own a burger joint like this. This one's in Dayton, Ohio, but there's an old White Tower for sale in Toledo.
There's a White Tower in Toledo, Ohio, for sale for $1, but the catch is that you have to move it. The YWCA next door wants to expand and is looking for a way to get rid of this location of the onetime White Castle competitor.
If there are no takers, the building might be torn down in fall. Come on! Some history-minded burger lover out there oughtta get on this. Could you imagine grabbing a cool little building like this to open a slider joint? And it's like $0.00016 a square foot (600 square feet total). [Tip o' the hat to T.J.]
It's fun. It's messy. It's a contest like no other, it's the "ketchup bowl." Your mission is to pluck as many hamburgers from a baby pool filled with ketchup in 3 minutes.
Friend of AHT Joe Schumacher hit The Spot in Sidney, Ohio, yesterday. This is a burger joint that more than a few readers have emailed me about and that one listener of Maxim Radio's Covino & Rich show called in about when I appeared as a guest there last Thursday.
I've never had the opportunity to visit, but thanks to Joe's write-up of the place, I now have an idea of what I'm missing. That burger looks incredible.
The Spot Address: 201 South Ohio Street, Sidney OH 45365 Phone: 937-492-9181 URL: thespottoeat.com
Yippee ki-ay, burgerlovers! It's time for another burger-link roundup! Enjoy, pardners!
Give me your burgers! Arrrrrgh!
Remember Total Recall? And how the Governator's character is looking for some Martian mutant resistance leader named Kuato? And how, at the end, it's revealed that Kuato is really some weirdass person-in-a-person?
Well, the former Burger Chef chain is kinda like that. In 1982, Burger Chef was bought out by the corporate parent of Hardee's and most Burger Chefs morphed in to Hardee's. But now, the stunted little Burger Chef that has long been a hidden part of Hardee's corporeal mass is getting its (limited) time in the sun. Hardee's locations in certain Midwestern cities are bringing back Burger Chef's signature burger, the Big Shef. If you live in the Indiana cities of Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Fort Wayne, or South Bend or in Dayton, Ohio, you'll be able to eat your way down memory lane.
The Big Shef, served in the '70s and '80s, was a quarter-pound burger with two charbroiled patties, American cheese, shredded lettuce, and special Big Chef sauce. Doesn't seem so special these days, but I suppose it might be like Proust's madelines to Midwest burger lovers of a certain age.
Is original bad-boy chef Marco Pierre White coming to America? If so, will he go downmarket? Grub Street's Josh "Mr. Cutlets" Ozersky grills the onetime mentor to Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Says White: "America doesn’t need any more great chefs. It’s about me taking my knowledge from the three-star world and taking it down to the level of a three-star burger or a three-star steak. I’d want to take a concept you could roll out across the country. One that’s easy for the family.
Do you dig fast-food burgers? Then you're ugly and dumb. But, hey, there's some good news: "A paper published in the May issue of Appetite, a scientific journal, concludes that unhealthy eaters are viewed as 'less physically attractive, less warm, less intelligent, and less studious' than their carrotmunching peers. On the upside, fast-food lovers are perceived as easygoing and more sociable."
An In-N-Out opened in Tucson, Arizona, last week. It's the easternmost outpost of the well-regarded chain yet. Not eastern enough for many folks' taste, however. Note to In-N-Out: Go national! Says ScrippsNews.com: "By noon, more than 100 people were waiting outside and the drive-thru line was at least 100 vehicles deep. The wait to simply place an order took as long as an hour." Pent-up In-N-Out cravings in parts farther east would make the Tucson lines look tame.
The Wendy's chain might be up for sale. Shares rose on the news. Not that fun, but I thought you might like to know.
Nobody disputes that Louis' has served its hamburgers longer than any other restaurant. The oldest continuously published newspaper in America thereby declares the oldest continuing hamburger joint in America the authentic one. So there.
Posted by Adam Kuban, September 8, 2006 at 2:09 AM
From PRNewswire:
The winner of the 2006 White Castle Crave Time Cook Off has been crowned. Missy O'Malia of Columbus, Ohio, won the 15th annual White Castle recipe contest with her creative concoction, Enchiladas de White Castle Burgers y Queso.
Enchiladas de White Castle Burgers y Queso beat out nearly 350 entries received from across the country for this year's competition. The recipes were judged on the best use of ten White Castle hamburgers, originality, and taste. Missy will receive a Crave Case of 30 hamburgers every week for the next year for her creative use of the product.
Hear ye, hear ye: The inaugural National Hamburger Festival will come to session August 12 to 13 in Akron, Ohio.
Events will include Best Burger (amateur and restaurant divisions), the Miss Hamburger Festival competition (rrrawwwrrr), and Bobbing for Burgers: "Pluck as many hamburgers [as possible] from a baby pool filled with ketchup in 3 minutes."
Perhaps most intriguing, though, to students of hamburger history are the Hamburger Hearings: "a mock trial featuring representatives from the four cities and families that claim to have invented the beloved Hamburger."
For the record, those cities and familes are: The Menches Bros. (Akron, Ohio), Hamburger Charlie (Seymour, Wisconsin), Fletcher Davis (Austin, Texas), and Louis Lassen (Louis' Lunch; New Haven, Connecticut).
AOL Cityguide has done it again. In late March, the good folks there brought you the best burgers in New York. Now they've compiled the "15 Burgers to Try Before You Die" (hmm ... strange echo of Alan Richman's piece in GQ last year, "The 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die.") Without further ado, they are ...
Some of you might recall an ad campaign a few years ago -- was it for Burger King? -- in which a couple of Gen X slacker guys are sitting around, watching TV or playing video games when one of them is like, "Burgers! You fly, I'll buy."
Well, this story gives new meaning to that phrase while turning it on its ear. Twice a week, an 80-year-old pilot in Cleveland flies his buddies to acclaimed diners in neighbor states to eat lunch.
The pilot, Roger Levering, and his pals call it the "$100 hamburger lunch," for an obvious reason: While the burgers might cost a few bucks, the fuel to get there jacks the price, well, sky high.
John Menches [CEO of Menches Bros. Original Hamburgers] had always been told his great-grandfather invented the hamburger in 1885. But for decades, this was little more than legend and lore at family reunions. Then in 1991, Menches and his siblings stumbled across the original recipe among some old papers their great-grandmother left behind. So, they took out some ground beef, added brown sugar, coffee, and some other ingredients, and discovered one great hamburger.
There are a few different stories detailing the origin of the hamburger, and this one fleshes out the notion that it was invented in Hamburg, New York. The story includes a Q&A:
Q: How did your great-grandfather invent the hamburger? A: Our great-grandfather Charles and his brother Frank were traveling concessionaires back in 1885. They did the Hamburg fair, which is located about eight miles south of Buffalo. They were a 100-man operation. They were really noted for their sausage sandwich. The fair was run in August. It was too hot, and they ran out of sausage. It was too hot to butcher because there was no refrigeration, and the meat wouldn't have turned out very well.
They were talked into using ground beef, which back then was a little taboo. Fairs were where the highest of society met, and ground beef was more for lower-class people, so they didn't think they'd be successful with it. Faced with nothing to sell at all, they fried it up, but it was too bland.
My grandfather decided to put coffee, brown sugar, and some other household ingredients in it and cooked up the sandwich. My great-uncle Frank served the first sandwich, a gentleman tasted it and said, "What do you call it?" Uncle Frank didn't really know what to call it, so he looked up and saw the banner for the Hamburg fair and said, "This is the hamburger."
Although it'd be a cool name for a burger joint, International House of Hamburgers is a play, written by Cliff Hershman and directed by Chris Johnston, currently running at the Bang and Clatter Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, until November 22. Although their website only describes the play as, "A dark, comedic tale about doing your job as if your life depended on it!" this less than favorable review from Chuck Yarborough of The Plain Dealer gives a bit more information, mostly in the form of burger-related puns. It seems like the most fun Yarborough got out of seeing the play was being able to compare it to a burger:
Featuring such events as "Bobbing for Burgers." As the 
Give me your burgers! Arrrrrgh! 
Remember Total Recall? And how the Governator's character is looking for some Martian mutant resistance leader named Kuato? And how, at the end, it's revealed that Kuato is really some weirdass person-in-a-person?
Hear ye, hear ye: The inaugural 
From Businessweek:
