Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,64
had run its course. The Wendy’s black-bean burger was unceremoniously discontinued, survived by its vegetarian kin of baked potatoes, fries, and salads.
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So long as the hamburger remains the national meal, there will always be a market for places like Freddy’s, the Wichita-born steakburger-and-custard chain. Before surrendering at a Colorado federal prison in 2012, disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich stopped at one to indulge in one last bite of freedom before starting his fourteen-year sentence. If Blagojevich’s goal was to corrupt himself one last time before serving time for corruption, he could certainly have done worse than a Freddy’s double-patty melt.*
In recent years, Freddy’s has quickly grown into a regional juggernaut, garnering some messianic praise and appearing on a growing number of lists of America’s best burgers and best chains. The company’s namesake is Freddy Simon, a smiling ninety-four-year-old Kansan and World War II vet, who makes a habit of touring the Wichita-area stores at least once a week, handing out “Freddy Bucks” to children. The franchise was founded by his two sons and a business partner to honor their love of custard, the frozen dairy-land staple they’d eaten growing up, and a recipe for steakburgers that Freddy had made for the family. And if all this didn’t sound wholesome enough already, add in a 1950s retro-diner motif with black-and-white-checkered floors, red chairs and tables, and old pictures of Freddy. At a store in Wichita, the booths were squeezed full with pockets of kids still out for summer, older couples, and a few high school football players likely in the middle of preseason two-a-days. At one table, there was literally a mailman in high socks drinking a milkshake.
Part of what’s intriguing about Freddy’s is not just that it’s a burger place from Wichita—the place of origin for White Castle and, by some interpretations, the hamburger itself—it’s also a newer small chain in rapid ascent. In the weeks before my visit, the 150-unit company had launched 21 new franchises in twenty-one weeks, and one trade publication had declared it the fourth-fastest growing chain in the country. “We opened our first Freddy’s when I was fifty-two, so the same as Ray Kroc,” Randy Simon, one of the cofounders explained. “My wife said, ‘Why did you wait until fifty-two to get into the burger business?’ I said, ‘That’s what Ray did.’ She thought we were retired at that point.”
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The invention of the steakburger is widely credited to Steak ’n Shake, a classic Midwestern fast-food institution and a by-product of the Wichita-inspired burger boom. The first Steak ’n Shake was inaugurated in Normal, Illinois, in 1934 by Gus and Edith Belt, the perfect names for the creators of the steakburger. Gus would wait until the restaurant was full, then roll in barrels of meat, including finer cuts of round, sirloin, and T-bone, and grind them in view of onlooking guests. The lavish assemblage of beef would be formed into burger patties (hence the steakburger name), then prepared in a kitchen with an open view. Belt’s enduring burgerly maxim: “In sight it must be right.”*
Ever since, true burger obsessives have had their own imaginings of what makes an ideal steakburger. “Well, it’s a leaner beef and it’s a higher-quality cut of the beef,” Simon explained. “Generally, steakburgers are considered somewhere between eighty-five/fifteen to ninety/ten [in the ratio of meat to fat]. To me, traditionally, a steakburger is a smash burger, so it sizzles and grills quickly. That’s why the double is so popular, people want to taste the meat, they don’t just want a little chip in theirs.”
What’s incredible about a smashed steakburger is the texture; because it’s flattened thin, the heavily seasoned meat crisps on the edges and browns in what gastronomes and scientists characterize as the Maillard reaction. The result is a marriage of savory, salty, and the best kind of flaky, almost like bread crust. A Freddy’s steakburger is then topped with American cheese by default, which devilishly compensates for the fat lost in the leaner meat. Follow that with layers of chilled and crunchy lettuce, pickles, onions, and a squeeze of sharp yellow mustard, then throw it all on a butter-toasted bun. It’s difficult to imagine that people who live in a world with this kind of possibility would ever do things like go to war or eat black beans.
In addition to its burgers, Freddy’s is also useful for clarifying the somewhat blurry boundaries between the fast-food and fast-casual segments. Before Simon and I had sat down,