Offbeat Eats

Carol’s employer has some pretty cool employee benefits programs. One of them tries to address the fact that the Upper Valley area of NH/VT isn’t exactly the most happening place, and offer a lot of programs for both local recreation, as well as travel. As part of this program, they offer up cheap trip (that’s how we went on last month’s trip to New York City for Grimaldi’s, for example). This month, they offered up a cheap day trip to Montreal, so at 5am, we hopped onto a bus at Dartmouth, and by 10:30 we were at Dorchester Square in downtown Montreal. After breakfast and some light shopping, we decided to head up to one of my favorite parts of town (the “Plateau”, where there are a lot of cool shops and restaurants on Boulevard St Laurent and Rue St Denis). To get up there, we availed ourselves of Montreal’s most excellent Bixi bike rental system. After an hour of riding Bixi bikes around Mont Royal park and the plateau, we decided a small lunch was in order. We ended up going to a place that’s been on my hit list for a while: Patati Patata, a small little diner featuring sliders and poutine.

One of the things I rather enjoy about the Detroit area is that the food scene still has a strong independent “slider” presence. Yeah, you know, sliders, those little hamburgers served on small greasy buns with the onions? Chances are, if you’ve had one recently, it was at White Castle (in the North) or Krystal (in the South). But in addition to these well known chains, there are still several places in the country (Hackensack, NJ, for example) where various independent operators and small chains are still churning out classic sliders, and doing it will a quality no longer seen at White Castle or Krystal. Detroit is one of these areas. Within the greater Detroit metro are are literally dozens of little slider shops, including Brayz (Hazel Park), Telway (Madison Heights and Detroit), Bates (Livonia and Farmington Hills), Bray’s (Westland), Greene’s (Farmington), Hunter House (Birmingham)… the list goes on. While I’ve long wished to do a “slider tour of Detroit” (ever since I did my review of Bates Hamburgers in Livonia way back in 2006), I haven’t yet been able to assemble the time and stomach space (and Costco-sized supply of antacid) that such a venture requires. But I have been trying to pick them off as opportunity allows, and a visit to the Detroit Zoo conveniently allowed us to duck over to adjacent Madison Heights to try Telway again…

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.