In honor of Burger Week, we reached out to a number of chefs, restaurateurs, food writers and friends of Eater to find out what burgers make them go ga-ga.
Edzo's griddled bacon burger with fried egg [Photo: TriphenaW/Flickr]
For our final installment of Hamburger Helpers (and our final official Burger Week post), Where Chicago editor J.P. Anderson takes us up to Evanston to discuss, in his own words, why he loves the griddled burgers at Edzo's Burger Shop.
You can keep your half-pound patties. When it’s burger time, I want mine smashed super-thin on a griddle, preferably with nice little crusty bits around the edges for texture. And if at all possible, it should be from Edzo’s, which in my opinion does the griddled patty better than anyone in these parts.
For me, a trip to Edzo’s is a most comforting ritual, and most predictable. I know chef/owner Ed Lakin will be at the counter taking orders (or, during a rare slow period, tweeting and Facebooking like mad on his nearby laptop). I know he’ll make a wisecrack about my habit of ordering every premium topping on the menu.And I know that a few minutes later, after biding my time guzzling Dr. Pepper from the fountain (the best kind) or sucking down a concrete-thick Nutella milkshake, my brief wait will be rewarded with the bacon-cheddar-jalapeño-mushroom-fried egg-garlic butter burger of my dreams.
As you can imagine, it’s a roughly 20-napkin affair: Runny yolk squirts out the side after the first bite, and from then on it’s a race to eat the thing before it just plain old falls apart in my hands. But needless to say, it’s a challenge I regularly and enthusiastically undertake.
· All Hamburger Helpers Coverage on Eater Chicago [~EChi~]
