Paper Palate

This month Food Network is all about the grill and that theme transitions over to their magazine as well. Inside the pages of the June/July issue, you will find The Neelys’ Father’s Day brunch menu, Bobby Flay’s favorite burger recipes and the Summer Grilling Guide.

Of particular interest is the Ultimate Burger in Every State list.  We Americans love our lists and “best places for” lists are no exception.  They give us ammo for debate motivation to do a better job.  After all nothing motivates like ego.  For most, the true fun of a list is to see if their experiences are listed and how they rate with the rest of the country.

The Burger List is a prime example.  Of the 50, I am quite familiar with three and vaguely familiar with roughly a half dozen others.  Of the three I know, the most remote is Creek Bank Restaurant in Wagarville, Alabama.  It is located about an hour outside of my hometown of Mobile and has come to recent fame when Mobile Press Register Food Editor David Holloway made it the upset winner of his exhaustive three-year search for South Alabama’s best burger.

Rotier’s in Nashville is one of the great greasy spoon dive joints in the country.  They have the best blue cheese dressing in the nation.  So good, patrons gladly pay an extra 50¢ to get it.  Their burgers are also the stuff of legends as they are served on a poppy seed French bread loaf.  At Rotier’s, you’ll find a clientele that is diverse as record execs, country music stars, Vanderbilt and Belmont University students and long haired rockers all eventually enter the gritty family-owned eatery.

Other than a subtle joke in the movie Fletch, I was unaware of California’s In-N-Out Burger.  That is until I struck up a friendship with Nashville musician and producer Jerry Navarro.  Chigg, as he is known to his friends, was raised in L.A..  According to Chigg, a standard day began about 5AM with his mother making taquitos for himself and his friend Chris as they headed out to ride the waves before class.  They surfed a beach directly across from their college and would often head straight to class in their wet suits, shoeless and still dripping of Pacific brine.  After class they would grab an In-N-Out burger before climbing back on their boards.  To Navarro, and many other Californians, a Double-Double is as much a part of the LA experience as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or trans-gender prostitutes.

Photo courtesy of Food Network Magazine.