One More Burger

For my last meal before departing the US for the better part of at least the next two years I headed to In-N-Out. If you’ve never heard of this place and you like burgers, head out to California. I figured I couldn’t get much further from what I’ll be eating while in Southeast Asia than a fast food burger, but I didn’t want some filthy 2-parts-beef-to-three-parts-flies-rats-and-whatever-else-is-handy burger. Go to the website if you’re interested in In-N-Out’s practices.

I had heard that you can order your burger animal style, which means that they fry the onions up with the burger and add some mustard, and so I thought I’d try it (you can also order your fries animal style, but because I didn’t order them, I won’t explain here). The sandwich came with two patties and two layers of cheese, 1,000 Island-like special sauce, lettuce, tomato and pickle all on a seedless bun. It was fantastic and I would recommend that anyone who likes burgers tries In-N-Out’s animal style. The lettuce was crisp and stacked thick enough that it gave the burger nice snap and cool temp to offset the patties. This is one of the most underrated aspects of a good burger: the ice burg lettuce factor. You need enough that it adds freshness to the sandwich, but not so much that it makes the bun soggy.

I also had fries. They were average, which is to say that they didn’t screw them up by over cooking them, making them limp, or leaving them under the heating lamp too long so that they dry out. It’s a simple thing to cook fries, but you’d be surprised the number of times you get stubby, dry half fries without salt. Dairy Queen used to put a fantastic seasoning on their fries, but only those ordered in a basket, from some reason. Who knows why? Trade secret I guess, and it’ll never be clear as they no longer do that. It’s been so long in fact that no one that works and the Dairy Queen in Eugene even knows about it. Anyway, In-N-Out’s fries are good, but nothing to write about, so I’ll stop here.

I gave the meal 4 forks over all, knocking it down from 4.5 because the fries were merely average, though to be fair, perhaps I should’ve tried them animal style. The burger stands alone at 4.5, only needing sesame seeds on the bun and the option of adding bacon to make it a five.

As a side note, I had my first Krispy Kreme directly from an actual Krispy Kreme donut shop. My only previous experience with this fantastic pastry was from a box of donuts in a town that had a Krispy Kreme whose whereabouts I did not know.