The Patty Melt: Poor man’s burger, or wholly wonderful?
// May 31st, 2009 // Comments // Restaurants, Reviews, rants
There’s this dark area of the morning, just after you’ve scratched the sleep from your eyeballs, thrown on the dirty T-shirt from the night before, and desire to drink coffee as if it were the sweet sweet nectar of life. You drag yourself out into the thin morning, shielding your delicate skin from the cool burn of the morning sun, and partake in that strange ritual we like to call brunch.
I’m a huge fan of brunch. I love eggs and bacon and sausage. And while I personally feel that burgers are the only thing on this planet that is not always made better by adding bacon, I do feel that brunch is universally made better by adding hamburgers. I’m somewhat convinced that this is a product of my midwestern upbringing. Many a childhood meal consisted of little more than two fried eggs and a frozen beef patty in a pan. Then again, maybe my mother is the sole source of my obsession with meat. Something like that.
This morning I ventured to Swingers, a trendy diner chain in Los Angeles, where I was met with a bevy of fascinating options on their menu. One whole page is dedicated to breakfast (as it should be), but only three burgers were to be found on the sandwich side: a classic California burger, a turkey burger, and an old-fashioned patty melt. Not really feeling the eggs and bacon vibe at that particular moment, I opted for some ground goodness.
But I got to thinking, is the patty melt really a hamburger? A classic patty melt is served on rye bread with fried onions and cheese. Surely the bread substitution doesn’t disqualify it as a hamburger, right? After all, if I had a pound of ground beef, but no bun, you better believe I’d slap it on a couple slices of sandwich loaf before I turned it into Hamburger Helper. And what about the specificity of the toppings? Does it qualify as a wholly separate entity, a sandwich of its own? It does have its own name, after all. Even the name suggests it is a melt, and not a hamburger.
Well, I for one don’t really care, so long as it’s delicious. And for my money, there are few things as wonderful at brunchtime than a patty melt. It’s dinerlicious, it’s greasy, it’s cheap, it’s like a hamburger, but maybe not. In my book it’s good, and that’s all that matters.
This particular patty melt was cooked exactly how I asked, medium rare, despite its thinness, and that is no small feat. The fries are fresh (I love when I can taste the oil it’s been cooked in, rather than the previous 6 batches worth of burnt bits). The onions were sauteed perfectly, not burned, and not overpowering. And the Swiss cheese was not as mild as typical Swiss, making for a really great added dash of tanginess. It was a solid sandwich, a little overpriced at $8.50, but not so bad when you consider how good it tasted.
Just for fun, a little poll, which you can answer in the comments: is the patty melt a hamburger, yes or no?
