The secret project I am working on causes me to spend most of my time locked in sedentary battle with my computer in New Jersey. I'm back in Hungary in a couple of weeks, but until then, I still have time to pick and choose among the strange, tiny hamburgers that are a local specialty of backwoods New Jersey. Tiny hamburgers - also known as sliders before the term came to describe appetizers on bistro menus - are a Jersey specialty going back to the Great Depression, when a small amount of cheap ground beef was smashed onto a griddle with a fistful of onions to produce a cheap, filling, and affordable lunch.
The same rules apply today at the
White Manna, a remarkably anachronistic holdover from the 1930s located on River Road in Hackensack, New Jersey. The White Manna used to be owned by the father of an elementary school buddy of mine, a Cherokee Indian married to a Hungarian woman, so we got to know it rather well. For the last 20 years or so the new owners have resisted all attempts to modernize or franchise the idea, making it one of the last of the authentic Jersey burger huts left standing today.
You don't have a lot of choice - basically, onions or no onions, cheese or no - and you wait with a crowd of folks standing around talking about life in Hackensack in English or Spanish. The cooks seem to be Peruvians these days - the woman mastering the grill has been there for years.
The result - served on a New Jersey soft potato roll, which allows for squishyness without disintegrating into a bready mess - is something you can't easily describe. Meat, cheese, onions, bun all seem to meld into a single flavor of ...
squishy burgerness.
Unforunately, I have only eaten these while sober. In other mental states I would guess that these would seem like the
Best Food In The World Ever. Packed elbow to elbow into the tiny diner, customers tend to wind up in conversation with each other and the staff, and the conversation tends to be about hamburgers. In particular, hamburgers that are a bit like the ones at White Manna. The closest in the area are
White Castle burgers, and the new Boys in Town: Five Guys. The White Castle burger chain rarely sets up shop in a prosperous town - they go for highways, strip malls, and low income nighborhoods.
Not merely a Jersey burger, White Castles are the oldest franchise burger chain still operating in the United States, and although they have updated their marketing strategy (calling their tiny meatwads "craves" and "sliders") they are still worthy of a good stoner movie. White Castles were the first of the two major culinary discoveries of my childhood (the other one was clams...) and I still remember the stomach ache I got in 1965 after eating eight of them in a sitting in the Bronx. I had to take Aron back there with my Dad in tow just to make sure he got a stomach ache like the one I got so long ago.
Aron first had a White Castle in 2001 when he was eight years old after discovering he didn't like Honduran
pupusas - the resourceful Bob Godfried pulled into a North Bergen White Castle branch and we bought the little guy a bagful of the insidious meat crack. During the ride home he kept asking for "another of those dreamy hamburgers" and finally, eight years later, I was able to provide them. A few days later we hit the
Hackensack franchise of Five Guys.
Five Guys is a Washington D.C. based chain of burger joints that is trying to provide an east coast equivalent of the California In-and-Out burger: a fresh and not-so-fast food burger that is made to order from high quality ingredients. On one of our first forays into Manhatten, Fumie, Aron and I were searching for a particular Chinese restaurant in Greenwhich village on a freezing night... only to find it had moved entirely across town. Desperate and facing iminent stravation, we began looking for alternatives when we saw a Five Guys across 7th Avenue... and were saved. The staff were friendly, the food was excellent, and th choices mercifully limited. Burgers. Double burgers. Choice of toppings. All burgers well done - I like them medium rare, but who is to argue. They know what they are doing here.
The fries are all freshly cut from stacks of potatos piled along the walls. When you order they warn you that it will take about ten minutes to make your burger. Five Guys proves that fast food doesn't have to be bad - or fast.
Another Jersey institution that we just missed was the hot dogs at Hiram's in Fort Lee. There used to be two hot dog stands right next to each other: Callahan's and Hirams, and back in High School these were the go-to places where the young and restless from different school districts used to go to scout each other out. We stopped in on New Year's day... and not surprising we found the place closed. Better luck next time!
The secret project I am working on causes me to spend most of my time locked in sedentary battle with my computer in New Jersey. I'm back in Hungary in a couple of weeks, but until then, I still have time to pick and choose among the strange, tiny hamburgers that are a local specialty of backwoods New Jersey. Tiny hamburgers - also known as sliders before the term came to describe appetizers on bistro menus - are a Jersey specialty going back to the Great Depression, when a small amount of cheap ground beef was smashed onto a griddle with a fistful of onions to produce a cheap, filling, and affordable lunch. 
You don't have a lot of choice - basically, onions or no onions, cheese or no - and you wait with a crowd of folks standing around talking about life in Hackensack in English or Spanish. The cooks seem to be Peruvians these days - the woman mastering the grill has been there for years.
The result - served on a New Jersey soft potato roll, which allows for squishyness without disintegrating into a bready mess - is something you can't easily describe. Meat, cheese, onions, bun all seem to meld into a single flavor of ... squishy burgerness.
Unforunately, I have only eaten these while sober. In other mental states I would guess that these would seem like the Best Food In The World Ever. Packed elbow to elbow into the tiny diner, customers tend to wind up in conversation with each other and the staff, and the conversation tends to be about hamburgers. In particular, hamburgers that are a bit like the ones at White Manna. The closest in the area are White Castle burgers, and the new Boys in Town: Five Guys. The White Castle burger chain rarely sets up shop in a prosperous town - they go for highways, strip malls, and low income nighborhoods.
Not merely a Jersey burger, White Castles are the oldest franchise burger chain still operating in the United States, and although they have updated their marketing strategy (calling their tiny meatwads "craves" and "sliders") they are still worthy of a good stoner movie. White Castles were the first of the two major culinary discoveries of my childhood (the other one was clams...) and I still remember the stomach ache I got in 1965 after eating eight of them in a sitting in the Bronx. I had to take Aron back there with my Dad in tow just to make sure he got a stomach ache like the one I got so long ago. 
Aron first had a White Castle in 2001 when he was eight years old after discovering he didn't like Honduran pupusas - the resourceful Bob Godfried pulled into a North Bergen White Castle branch and we bought the little guy a bagful of the insidious meat crack. During the ride home he kept asking for "another of those dreamy hamburgers" and finally, eight years later, I was able to provide them. A few days later we hit the Hackensack franchise of Five Guys. 
The fries are all freshly cut from stacks of potatos piled along the walls. When you order they warn you that it will take about ten minutes to make your burger. Five Guys proves that fast food doesn't have to be bad - or fast.
Another Jersey institution that we just missed was the hot dogs at Hiram's in Fort Lee. There used to be two hot dog stands right next to each other: Callahan's and Hirams, and back in High School these were the go-to places where the young and restless from different school districts used to go to scout each other out. We stopped in on New Year's day... and not surprising we found the place closed. Better luck next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment