Hamburger America (4 page)

The burger selection at Gott’s ranges from the traditional with American cheese to gourmet creations topped with guacamole or blue cheese. The extensive menu also includes healthy options like a chicken club, veggie tacos, and a Cobb salad, but no meal at Gott’s would be complete without one of their extraordinary milkshakes. The first time I was there the flavor of the day was mango. The woman in front of me tasted hers and proclaimed, “Oh MAN, that’s good!” I had an espresso bean milkshake that I still dream about today.

There’s no indoor seating and the carhops are long gone, so find a spot at one of the many large red picnic tables in front, or on the spacious back lawn. Save your wine tasting for Gott’s too. There’s a separate “bar” here that serves a rotating selection of over 40 local wines and eight smallbatch beers like Sierra Nevada and Anchor Steam. I’m not too confident about the pairing of a cheeseburger and a good Cabernet, but I can tell you there’s nothing like a great burger and a cold beer. Add Napa Valley to the equation and you’ll be in heaven.

I asked Duncan why the offspring of a wine family (his brother is a fifth-generation winemaker in the region) decided to buy a hamburger stand and he told me, “We have a family love affair with food.” They weren’t even sure the venture would work. “The day we opened 500 people showed up, and we thought, ‘We could do this . . . we could be successful!’”

 

 

H
odad’s is exactly what you are looking for in a Southern California burger destination—an open-air restaurant serving enormous, tasty, no-frills burgers wrapped in waxed paper just steps from the beach. The atmosphere is inviting, with its license-plate-covered walls, the front end of a ’66 VW Microbus that serves as a two-person booth, a public water bowl for dogs outside, and a sign reading “No shoes, no shirt . . . no problem!”

There are basically three burgers to order here: the Mini, the Single, and the Double. Single burgers start as a one-third pound patty. A Double involves two patties, and after adding cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo, bacon, and so on, becomes very large. The bacon served at Hodad’s is out of this world. Longtime employee Benny invited me into the kitchen to show me how the bacon is prepared. Fortunately for the sake of keeping proprietary secrets safe, I didn’t really follow the process. It involved large amounts of special, uncooked bacon in a sieve sitting over a pot of
boiling water. At some point this
bacon boil
is transferred to the grill, cooked to crispy, and married to your burger. The taste is truly unique and adds an intense smokiness to the burger experience. I also got a glimpse of the decades-old cast-iron grill. Needless to say, I can see where a Hodad burger gets its flavor.

The restaurant doesn’t grind their own beef anymore, though tattooed 14-year employee Junior told me, “We get a delivery of fresh patties every morning.” And don’t miss the fries. They are enormous, battered slices of potato that resemble the popular “Jo-Jo,” a deep-fried, mid- western truck stop spud specialty.

Like a surprising number of hamburger stands in America, Hodad’s has moved locations three times, but all within a few blocks. It is owned by Michael Hardin, whose parents built the first stand in the sand next to the lifeguard tower in 1969. “This location has been great for us,” he said of the newer central Ocean Beach spot. “We have crowds all year, even in winter.”
And manager Jeremy told me, “We are slammed in the summertime and have a line down the street from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. There is no down time here!” Because of this, a new Hodad’s location is in the works, set to open in downtown San Diego sometime in 2011.

Michael is a true, tattoo-covered, Ocean Beach local. He even has the local surfer’s code “1502” tattooed across his back, which in surfer vernacular refers to Ocean Beach. You can see Michael driving around town regularly in his customized, chopped VW Microbus, a great-looking, shortened bus with about six feet missing from its center. “We’ll drive it into the O.B. parades unregistered,” Michael told me laughing, “and the guys will do donuts and throw fries out the window.”

Hodad’s still accepts license plate donations, and if you submit a custom plate your meal is free. You really have never seen a collection of plates quite this extensive.

What is a “hodad”? A person who hangs out at the beach and pretends to be a surfer. Hodad or not, I would suggesting eating here
after
surfing, not before . . .

 

 

P
utting a fast food burger with over 250 locations in this book does not really seem like my style. But think of it this way—had McDonald’s, White Castle, Burger King, and many others stayed true to their roots, they’d be here too. Their rich histories and their place in the fabric of American food are just as amazing, but at some point they all lost their way. Not In-N-Out. One of the most successful privately-owned burger chains also just happens to make one of the best fresh-beef burgers in the nation.

Harry and Esther Snyder opened the first In-N-Out in Baldwin Park, California in 1948. It was a simple shoebox of a kitchen with drive-up windows on each side. Harry installed 2-way speakers at the ends of each driveway and in doing so revolutionized the business of fast food forever with the first drive-thru. His thinking was that while one order was being filled, the next was being placed. Brilliant.

Over the next 50 years In-N-Out expanded at a very slow and calculated rate. All through the ’60s and ’70s, the business of selling fast food burgers was in constant flux. Think of the temptation there must have been for In-N-Out to franchise, automate, and sell out. Many of the large chains were expanding at alarming rates, taking their companies public, and switching to a franchise system to sell more burgers to more people. As these places grew, the quality of the fast food burger slowly eroded. Most chains resorted to freezing their patties and shipping them over long distances—whatever it took
to make more money and please more shareholders. It’s absolutely mindboggling that Harry and Esther Snyder were persistent in their vision for In-N-Out.

When Harry passed away the future of In-N-Out was secure, thanks to an agreement that only blood relation could run the company. His youngest son Rich took the helm and managed to expand the company greatly without moving away from his parent’s core values. Before he died, Harry had expanded the chain to 18 locations limited to Southern California. Before Rich died in 1993, he had expanded the empire to almost 100 stores and today there are over 250 locations in 4 states (with Texas on the horizon). Part of In-N-Out’s reluctance to expand nationwide is based on the simple fear that it would dilute the product and ruin the brand. Sound familiar?

The “Double-Double” is the cornerstone of In-N-Out’s success. Made from two patties of unfrozen, fresh ground beef, iceberg lettuce, a slice of tomato, a thousand island-type spread, and two slices of American cheese, on a toasted bun and wrapped in waxed paper, the Double-Double is the perfect burger for one-handed driving. In-N-Out declined to tell me the size of the patties, but they seem to be around 2.5 ounces each. They are cooked on specially designed flattop griddles. The fries at In-N-Out start as fresh potatoes that are sent through a French fry cutter as the orders come in. And the shakes, the only thing frozen in the entire restaurant, are excellent. The real winner here, though, is the “Double-Double Animal Style” from In-N-Out’s fan-created “secret menu” (see page 27). I have yet to find its equal in the world of fast food hamburgers.

How many times have you seen a McDonald’s in a bad area with broken signs and missing light bulbs? You’ll never find one single thing out of place at ANY of the In-N-Out stores, ever. The constant upkeep makes each In-N-Out look like new. Management at In-N-Out maintains the company’s pristine appearance by doing what most companies should do—they treat their employees, or “associates” as they are referred to at In-N-Out, very well. Incentive programs that have been in place for decades are designed to make the well-compensated people who work at In-N-Out very happy and it shows.

One of the more intriguing aspects to the privately owned burger chain is the often talked about use of hidden Bible passages on the company’s packaging. Next time you visit an In-N-Out, flip over your drink cup or spread out the paper that your burger was wrapped in. You’ll find a chapter heading to a passage in the Bible (i.e., under the milkshake cup the reference to John 3:16, “For God so loved the world . . . ,” is printed). Can you imagine being a public company and doing this? The company’s bible-thumping campaign was put in place by former In-N-Out president and son of Harry, Rich Snyder. Just before he died in an awful plane crash, Rich found God and thought everyone else should too. He believed that the popularity of the hamburger was a great way to spread his faith. The use of the semi-hidden passages did little to scare off customers and actually did more to solidify In-N-Out’s cult status among its fans. Most of the restaurants in the chain are landscaped with two very tall palm trees that have been planted crossing each other to form an X, further fueling the In-N-Out mystique. In reality, Harry was a big fan of the film
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
, where the final scene involves crossed palms.

Although In-N-Out continues to expand, the core beliefs passed down through the family members over the decades have kept this hamburger phenomenon a mom-and-pop at heart. Hidden bible verses, crossed palm trees, happy grill cooks, and consistently tasty burgers are what the In-N-Out experience is all about. What more could you want from a burger joint?