Offbeat Eats

Driving from LA to Palmdale, my coworker Tony wanted to stop and grab a bite in Santa Clarita. He originally wanted Subway, but I talked him into the In-N-Out burger instead, which he had never had before. Myself, I’ve been to In-N-Out burger more times than I can count, but, oddly, I haven’t written it up here yet…

Miller’s Bar is the sort of place you have to hear about before going there, since from the outside (below right), it doesn’t really look much different from any of the other bars on Michigan Ave. It’s your basic neighborhood bar from the 1940s, with a fairly non-descript facade. Inside, it’s more of a post-WWII 40’s time capsule, with formica, copper, and a giant dominating bar…

(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) It’s a White River Junction institution. We all drive by it. I’ve eaten there several times. I even have a t-shirt of it (from the Main Street Museum). But, somehow, I hadn’t yet reviewed it. I’m talking about the Polka Dot, which has been located on Main Street by the railroad tracks for a long time (I’m not sure when the Polka Dot name showed up, but the location has been an eatery of one sort or another since the 19th century). Sure, WRJ doesn’t have the train traffic it used to, and several other businesses have come and gone, but the Polka Dot has stayed on (even through the fire that demolished the rest of the block a few years ago)…

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.