Offbeat Eats

(Closed) Detroit Burgers, Part Deux. As mentioned previously, the front desk clerk at my hotel in Michigan had some unusually strong opinions about the best burgers to be had in the area. Previously, he had recommended Bates Burgers (see review below), which was actually quite decent, but they were sliders, not the big, wrap your hands around them burgers I was craving. So I asked him the next best place to get a burger in Livonia. His second recommendation was Cheeburger Cheeburger, located just down the road from the hotel.

(Closed) here are several cuisines that are difficult for me to enjoy in rural NH, two of the most notable being Middle Eastern food and Vietnamese food. So whenever I’m travelling, I try to find good places to fill these gaps. Luckily, my September work travel ended up taking me to the western Detroit metro area, which is loaded with good Middle Eastern places. One of the more notable chains is La Shish (which I’ve been to before, although in a different location), which happened to have a location just down 6 Mile Road from my hotel.

Let’s start this out by getting something cleared up: there is no one sandwich known as a “hamburger.” Hamburgers have types; the hamburgers you get at different places aren’t really even the same. They range from your basic fast food burger (McDonalds, Burger King, …), to big two-handed thick burgers (Cheeburger Cheeburger, Fuddruckers, and, for you Arizonans, The Chuck Box), to specialty burgers (like the cheese-filled Jucy Lucy of Matt’s Bar in Minneapolis). And there’s little comparing burgers from one category to another. Indeed, one of these categories is the “slider”, the diminutive little burger fried on a bed of onions served on a little poofy roll. Midwestern folks can get them at White Castle, while Southerners get these at Krystal. And, for some odd reason, there are a lot of places in the Detroit Metro area that really took the White Castle concept to heart, opening similar burger joints in similar-looking buildings, with similar sliders.