Regional Hamburgers From The US You Need To Try

The earliest form of the hamburger may not have sprung up in the United States, but it certainly developed into an all-American treat. It's a simple hot sandwich, a patty made of cooked ground beef placed between two halves of a bun or slices of bread. In part because of the explosive spread of fast food in the 20th and 21st centuries, the notion of a hamburger has grown standardized: topped with condiments like mayonnaise, ketchup, and "secret sauce," and vegetables including onions, pickles, lettuce, and tomato, is virtually universal.

Either with or without those additions, the hamburger is still but a blank canvas awaiting additions or interpretations. The U.S. is a gigantic country that's home to hundreds of millions of people. The ways that even the most mainstream and ubiquitous foods are prepared and served can vary from region to region owing to different tastes, shared cultural backgrounds, and ingredient availability. This makes for a rich tapestry of little-known burger styles across America. Disparate sensibilities and creativity gave rise to pockets of the country where particular burger styles are favored, and they're relatively rarely found outside of that place. Here are the endemic burger styles of many regions across the states.

Only about 20,000 people live in the old Route 66 town of El Reno, the origin point of a very specific hamburger important to the food culture and history of Oklahoma. In the 1930s, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl crop-killing natural disaster ravaged the local economy. To make his beef stretch, and the food at his Hamburger Inn restaurant cost less, Ross Davis bulked up burgers with onions. His cooks sliced them incredibly thin and fried them on a flat-top stove, letting them heat up for a while before a ball of meat was smashed right in a spatula. A little bit of meat and half of an onion comprised what Davis called a Depression Burger.

El Reno sat at the corner of what was a well-traveled intersection at the time, where Route 66 and Highway 81 met. His inexpensive but tasty onion burgers got popular and other restaurants around Oklahoma opened up to serve them, including more Hamburger Inns. Three El Reno spots still serve them as a signature menu item in the 2020s: Sid's Diner, Robert's Grill, and Johnnie's Grill. America has started to fall in love with the Oklahoma onion burger, also sometimes called a smash burger. But the plethora, and starting point, of onions is what differentiates the style from other sandwiches with that name, which are just burgers with very wide and very thin patties.

In that fewer than 10 establishments in the area have the equipment and knowhow to make them, the steamed cheeseburg is hyper-specific to central Connecticut. A novelty first served at Jack's Lunch in Middletown in the 1930s, it resurfaced when Ted Duberek opened Ted's Diner in Meriden in the 1950s to serve what was at the time a substantial customer base of workers employed by silverware factories. Every other spot that's opened up since makes its steamed cheeseburgs the same way that Ted's does. As each sandwich is ordered, raw ground beef is packed into a small metal tray, and then it's all placed into a multi-compartment steaming rack. To fulfill the promise of the name cheeseburg, a slice of white cheddar cheese is also steamed, although separately from the meat, until it's hot and melty.

Why steam a cheeseburger at all? Adherents and proprietors claim that these are healthier than other burgers because no additional fat is needed for cooking, and because a lot of the fat drips out during the steaming process.

All over the populous Twin Cities metropolitan area in Minnesota, diners are likely to find a burger called the Juicy Lucy, or, if they're at Matt's Bar, the small neighborhood pub where the dish was invented in 1954, a "Jucy Lucy." After its invention on a whim, it found its way to the menu board, but misspelled, and the slightly wrong name stuck. According to Matt's Bar, the burger was born when a customer wanted an unusual cheeseburger, and owner Matt Bristol successfully attempted to make a stuffed one. He cooked two patties on the griddle, crimped the edges together, and folded sliced cheese into the middle. When the customer bit into it, and hot cheese poured into his mouth, he reportedly quipped, "That's a juicy Lucy!"

Today, at Matt's and the countless other places in and around Minneapolis that serve it, it's customary to wait a couple of minutes after being presented with the burger (cooked well done, seemingly almost burnt) to let the cheese cool down a little. Raw or grilled onions are a common topping while pickles are almost mandatory and lettuce and tomato are virtually forbidden.

In Montana, the most notable regionally popular burger comes down squarely on the side of the former in the old Miracle Whip versus mayonnaise debate. A nutburger, or Nutburger if it's being sold by the place that created it around 1930, gets its name from its only necessary and unique topping: a concoction of Miracle Whip and chopped up, salted peanuts. The sweet and salty flavors mix together in an apparently pleasing manner; some establishments use sugared mayonnaise instead of the Miracle Whip to achieve the same effect.

Matt's Place Drive-In, located in Butte, Montana, is the birthplace of the Nutburger. That's where all the tropes and guidelines associated with the local delicacy were honed. The burger is ideally fried up in a cast iron skillet and made from a scooped pile of fresh ground beef weighing roughly a quarter pound that gets flattened on the grill as it cooks. That's placed on a toasted but still soft white bun and then topped with little more than that made-to-order sauce of Miracle Whip (or sweetened mayonnaise) and salty bits of peanuts.

Tex-Mex cuisine is already a confluence of cuisine, consisting of traditional Mexican foods with a Texas spin. The San Antonio bean burger takes some Tex-Mex staples and applies them to the common hamburger, developed elsewhere in the United States. Before he started the Taco Cabana fast food chain in the 1970s, Felix Stehling purchased and operated Sills' Snack Shack in San Antonio. One of his additions to the menu was a dish of his own creation, which he called the bean burger. There are no beans in the patty, but among the many things that go on top of the grilled beef patty. Refried beans are a primary topping, along with other commonly Tex-Mex ingredients like Fritos and onions, as well as gooey, melty, processed Cheez Whiz spread.

From SIlls' Snack Shack, the bean burger spread around Texas. Many different versions can be found around the large state, which may incorporate additions like crushed tortilla chips instead of Fritos, melted cheddar in lieu of the Cheez Whiz, chilies, and pico de gallo.

The Pueblo slopper walks what was apparently a fine line between messy cheeseburger and an individually prepared casserole. It also dips into Southwestern food traditions, as its place of origin, southern Colorado is more or less a part of that region. There's some controversy over which Pueblo restaurant that made the slopper popular — Gray's Coors Tavern or the Star Bar — served it first in the 1970s, but both places cook it up in a similar fashion. First, two beef patties are fried up with American cheese until it melts, and it's all placed into a bowl, served in open face style. Onto that goes a cup or so of Pueblo-style green chili. That's a dish that's extremely prevalent in and around southern Colorado, a type of chili with a soupy consistency made by cooking together roasted mirasol peppers, onions, tomatoes, and pork.

A Pueblo slopper is made complete with a garnish of chopped raw onions. The final product is reminiscent of an enchilada, but one that tastes faintly like a backyard-grilled burger.

Pickles, and the salty and bitter brine in which they're made, nicely offset the greasy meatiness of a hamburger. In a large swath of Michigan, and seemingly only in that portion of the state, burger lovers get some bite into the mix with olives, not pickles. Kewpee was one of the first fast food chains in the United States, and it began in Flint, Michigan, in 1923. Olive burgers were on an early incarnation of the menu there — beef on a bun with the inclusion of a generous portion of olive sauce, a Michigan-based condiment made by mixing sliced green olives into mayonnaise. Two burger restaurants in Lansing, Olympic Broil and an independent vestige of the original chain, Weston's Kewpee Burger, helped popularize the olive burger for contemporary diners.

While some restaurants in Grand Rapids are known for olive burgers, the food is primarily a phenomenon in Lansing. The dish is pretty much the same everywhere, varying only due to different versions of the olive sauce — some places prefer to use more olive brine than others.

It's easy and mundane to fry a burger patty in a skillet. But just about only in Memphis, and as established by Dyer's, does anybody fry burgers in wide and deep pans loaded with a large volume of the grease used to cook however many burgers in the years beforehand. Fat that cooks off patties adds to the frying oil, as does the beef tallow that Dyer's occasionally adds in. That contributes substantial meaty flavor to what is already substantially meaty.

And it doesn't stop there. Dyer's customers can order their buns "dipped," which means the top half gets a brief swim in the liquified tallow, and with cheese. A slice of the processed American stuff is placed on the beef, which has been pressed and manipulated as it heats up until it measures about eight inches wide, and the whole thing gets tossed back in the frying pan so the cheese melts.

"Goober" is a historically colloquial name for peanuts in the Deep South, particularly in Georgia where they factor into many traditional dishes. That provided the name and unique characteristics of a burger found on the far edge of what can be considered the South. In the middle of the 20th century, a restaurant called The Wheel Inn, situated in the small city of Sedalia in central Missouri, debuted a menu item called the guberburger. Also known as a guber burger and goober burger, it starts with a fairly ordinary burger preparation of beef on a bottom bun with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato filling out the top. In between, and placed directly atop the meat when it's hot off the grill: some spoonfuls of peanut butter. When allowed to sit for a second, the peanut butter melts into the beef, making for a salty, sweet, and creamy burger.

The second version of the Wheel Inn closed down in 2013, but the guberburger lives on. Between Sedalia and the closest major city, Kansas City, which is a 90 minute drive away, countless burger joints, dives, stands, and restaurants cook up some version of a hamburger topped with melted peanut butter.

Mississippi and North Carolina are hundreds of miles apart, and they're the two main places where carbohydrate-loaded burgers are still commonplace. In 1917, John Weeks of Corinth, Mississippi, began selling what he called "Weeksburgers" out of a portable kitchen. To keep down the price of his sandwiches to a nickel apiece, Weeks asked his meat supplier to cut the beef with cheap flour and dried potatoes. Within a few years, Weeks had hired his brothers to run four more Weeksburgers stands, although the five-cent product eventually came to be known as slugburgers — it was the style at the time to call nickels "slugs." Corinth enjoys its food history — it annually holds a Slugburger Festival.

During the Great Depression, slugburgers experienced a revival. Due to the economic limitations of the time, home cooks and diner employees had to find new ways to make beef go a long way, and the slugburger returned across the South, with intrepid cooks utilizing crumbled biscuits, breadcrumbs, grits, white flour, potato flour, and pretty much any kind of cheap starch they had laying around, to mix into ground beef patties. The idea reached Mount Airy, North Carolina, a town so awash in classic Americana that it inspired the town of Mayberry from "The Andy Griffith Show," where it persists today as a menu item at a local diner called Snappy Lunch. Losing the charm and curiosity of "Weeksburger" or "slugburger," Snappy Lunch calls the crispy, bread-dominant offering the breaded hamburger.

Eastside Big Tom in the Washington state capital of Olympia is a standard and ordinary burger stand that makes standard and ordinary burgers in a style that quietly and slowly became a common preparation throughout the Pacific Northwest. Along with the usual toppings, customers are likely to find some variation of what Eastside Big Tom decided should be called "goop." It's a creamy, tangy, pale yellow-colored, hamburger special sauce. Unlike the omnipresent takes on Thousand Island dressing, this burger condiment is made from mixing up mayonnaise, mustard, pickle relish, and other ingredients that may remain a trade secret to individual restaurants, although it's probably salad dressing or sour cream in many cases.

Goop, under many names and permutations, can be found in small stands as well as in independent and small chain restaurants across the region, including Burgerville, the first unionized fast food restaurant in U.S. history. It's customary to grab a side order of the goop or goop clone to use as a dipping sauce for french fries.

In Utah, the local favorite is a mashup between a classic hamburger and a classic sandwich, much like the kind sold in huge weekly volumes by Katz's Deli in New York. Into a hamburger bun goes a big beefy patty, the regular condiments and burger-topping vegetables, and then as many slices of thin-cut pastrami as can fit, more or less equivalent to the amount of charbroiled meat used.

The pastrami burger was likely popularized in the 1970s by Crown Burgers, one of many restaurants in the Salt Lake City area opened up by newly arrived Greek immigrants. The original operators of Crown Burgers got the idea for a pastrami-topped cheeseburger from Minos Burgers, owned and run by a relative in Anaheim, California. The concept didn't really take off in California, but it did in Utah's biggest city. By the 2020s, Crown had grown into an eight-store chain, but there are plenty more restaurants in and around Salt Lake City where diners can get a pastrami burger, where the default preparation also includes sliced cheese and Thousand Island dressing.

Is it really a hamburger if the meat isn't held together in the form of a round patty? A tavern or canteen sandwich is also known as a loose meat sandwich because that's a very descriptive name: This hamburger variant consists of a pile of seasoned and cooked pellets of ground beef piled into a bun and traditionally topped with mustard and pickle slices. For those not from the Midwest or unfamiliar with its culinary culture, a loose meat sandwich is a lot like a sloppy Joe, a once popular sandwich nobody eats anymore, but without the sauce.

The sandwich gained acceptance in the 20th century because it was commonly served out of food trucks and in lunch counters, cafeterias, and taverns. Some people call the concoction a Maid-Rite after Taylor's Maid-Rite, a major proprietor of the sandwich, which operates more than two dozen locations in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, and Ohio.