Text 22295, 90 rader
Skriven 2007-11-04 22:46:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: A burger tale
=====================
Like Michael and a lot of other people here I have a passion for
good burgers. So when I stumbled upon the blog of the The Hungry
Cabbie: The Eating Adventures of a NYC Yellow Cabbie at
http://www.famousfatdave.com/blog/ which lead to A Hamburger Today
at http://aht.seriouseats.com/ which lead to this newspaper article
that made my mouth water I just had to re-post it:

Jack's breaks most of the rules restaurants operate by....

By Joe Stumpe, The Wichita Eagle, Kan.

The first thing to know about Jack's Coffee Shop is that there's no
Jack. And no coffee. But for more than 50 years, hungry lunch
patrons have piled into the little red building at 61st South and
Hydraulic. They come for the burgers, because there's nothing else.
No french fries. No salads. No chicken nuggets. No sign out front,
in fact, to let anyone know there's a business inside. Owner Shirley
Coleman, 69, said customers come to Jack's for one reason: "Because
we fill people up."

The burgers are probably closer to three-quarters of a pound, but
it's not like they are are weighed before they're shaped by hand and
slapped onto the grill.

Wichita is full of fast-food chains. But it's also home to seemingly
more than its share of small, independent burger joints like Jack's
Most are tucked away from the busiest intersections, where they can
take their own individualistic approach. To enter Jack's, 6154 S.
Hydraulic, is to be assaulted -- or seduced -- by the smell of
frying onions. Droplets of grease hover like humidity in the air.
The floor is concrete. The walls and counters remain unfinished, two
decades after Coleman last expanded the space. About half of the
two-dozen seats are usually occupied, some by construction workers
in sweat-streaked shirts, others by office workers with ties tossed
over their shoulders. 

Behind the counter, Donna Collins, Coleman's cook/ daughter-in-law,
stands on an overturned bun tray to better reach the grill. She
smashes the burgers as they cook, so that they hang way beyond the
edges of the buns and get slightly crispy around the edges. She
pours a little pickle juice over the frying onions to season them. 

Wichita lawyer Mike Jones probably knows as much about local burger
joints as anybody, having led employees of his firm on a weeklong
tour of them each summer for 15 years. Jones calls Jack's "hands
down my favorite for the burger itself and just the ambiance of the
place. You can't beat a place that's not even recognizable as a
place of business, let alone a restaurant," he said. "When you go in
July or August and get fresh, home-grown tomatoes and a big plate of
grilled onions on the side, it's just about as good as it gets."

Jack's Coffee Shop was started by Jack Cook at Pawnee and K-15.
She's heard rumors that some gambling and bootlegging may have taken
place there. Cook, now deceased, moved the building to its present
location when K-15 was widened in the 1950s. Cook and another man
ran it until 1970, when Coleman took it over with her husband, who
was about to be laid off from his aircraft job. They later divorced.
Coleman has five children, eight grandchildren and three
great-grandchildren. For a time, she ran Jack's as a bar where
regulars gathered to drink beer, play cards and shoot pool. The menu
included tacos and chili, but Coleman gradually whittled it down to
nothing but burgers. About a decade ago, slowed by arthritis, she
stopped selling beer and cut back her hours to 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Monday through Saturday. 

Today, $3.75 buys a half-pounder, $4.25 a three-quarter pounder.
That includes potato chips, which customers help themselves to out
of big plastic bowls. Soda pop, poured out of two-liter bottles, is
another buck. Coleman admits that a sign out front might attract
even more people. A drunken driver leveled the last one. A customer
offered to clean up and repaint some smaller signs, but he took them
with him and never returned. As for the lack of decor in Jack's,
Coleman said, "Sometimes some prissy old women don't like it, but
most people don't care." Jack's, she says, caters to a different
sort of customer -- one who likes a meal that sticks with him.

The Wichita Eagle, Kan.              


Every town should have a dive like that. Sadly Yellowknife doesn't;
there are no memorable burgers here.

Cheers

YK Jim


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