I received our copy of Seattle Met and on the front cover was a ridiculous sized burger, and a cover story about Seattle’s Top Burgers (and dogs…and BBQ). The magazine sat around a few days and I finally opened it and perused the article. After much (OK, very little) discussion, our family decided: We’ll be the judges of that.
So – this summer, approximately once per week we’ll be testing a burger place at which we have not eaten previously. We’ll score the categories, force our middle school aged child to use her summer math in order to crunch some numbers, and post it here. With some juicy burger photos. Don’t fret Seattle peeps, we won’t use reform math for the stats.
We have our own particularly weird family culture. From this we developed criteria:
- Bun – That bun better be worth the drive. None of these hard-arse kaiser rolls which a person can’t bite into. Nothing stale. No weird black seeds to get stuck in our teeth. And, no cheap buns that dissolve.
- Containment – Does the burger remain together while you are eating it? Nothing is worse to us than a burger which ends up in a soupy, crappy, mess and 30 napkins.
- Seasoning – Is the burger appropriately seasoned? Too salty? Not seasoned well enough? Too much garlic? Wait, I’m not sure that’s possible.
- Topping Selection -Are there enough options? One of us likes “everything, pile it on and then double it”. Some of us like it very spicy. One of us (I am not naming names) likes only a hamburger patty, and American cheese.
- Accoutrements – What’s the stuff WITH the stuff? Fries? Shakes? What are the options. Extra points here if you’re serving Full Tilt.
- Cheese – Plain old American? Tillamook? Beecher’s Reserve? Gorgonzola? Cotswald with spring chive and fig? Our people like cheese. I’ll keep it real: for some of us the burger is a delivery mechanism for awesome cheese. It better be cheesetastic, much like this blog post.
- Appropriate Grilling – Self explanatory on this one. Don’t hand me a burger still in the death throes of moo-ing unless I specifically ask for it that way.
- Atmosphere – Is the place so fabulously hipster there is no place for me to sit? While a cool standing burger sounds really amazing, I’m likely to go to email that back to my 27 year old single and childless self, and motor to the next place. And if I witness the guy in back making his own patties from organic free range meat, that’s awesome unless he’s sweating into the bowl.
Stay tuned!
Seattle Flour Child 