Route 66: Hamburgers so savory, they can make you cry
EL RENO, Okla. — The air downtown smells of grilled onions, wafting from the flat tops of three Route 66 restaurants that have helped give this small town about 25 miles west of Oklahoma City a distinct culinary identity.
They're called fried onion burgers. Plenty of places put onions on burgers. Few have been doing it as long, or as well, as they do here.
'They're not like any burger,' said Lyndsay Bayne, 48, the city's public information and marketing manager. 'It's hard to explain. You have to eat one.'
A few years before the country plunged into the Great Depression and the nascent Route 66 ferried Dust Bowl refugees west, a man named Ross Davis needed a way to stretch the supply of expensive ground beef he had to serve customers at his Hamburger Inn in El Reno.
Onions, he realized, were cheap. And so, the story goes, he decided to bolster each patty with shredded onions. Lots of them.
Thus, the fried onion burger was born. After the stock market crash of 1929, its popularity grew and it took on a second name: 'the Depression burger.'
The Hamburger Inn is no longer in El Reno, but the city's 19,000 residents have three options all within steps of each other on Route 66. Robert's Grill is the oldest, opened in 1926. Then there's Johnnie's Hamburgers & Coneys and Sid's Diner — a fourth, Jobe's Country Boy Drive-in, is about a mile west of downtown on Route 66.
They all follow the same idea: A massive pile of thinly sliced white onions are deposited on top of the thinly pressed patty as it cooks on the flat top. Then, the entire thing is flipped on its other side, so the burger cooks on top of the onions, which caramelize and fuse with the meat.
Follow our road trip: Route 66, 'The Main Street of America,' turns 100
The town has a festival every year where an 850-pound fried onion burger is cooked. Residents have their favorites among the pantheon of purveyors, and that seems to be largely based on tradition — they like best the place they went to in high school, or the place their grandparents took them as kids.
There does not appear to be the same kind of fierce allegiance or rivalry seen with Italian beef in Chicago or with po'boys in New Orleans.
But all are fairly united in the belief that the best fried onion burgers can only be found in El Reno.
Of the burger joints selling them in places such as Oklahoma City, Bayne said: 'Bless their hearts.'
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