Road Food – Only Burger

Soft unobtrusive music from the overhead speakers. Candles on every table. Waitrons cruising about, dressed in black and white, moving gracefully in their choreographed randomness. The perfectly coiffed hostess showing you and your guest to a table, six inches away from two other tables in the center of the dining room. All the other patrons dressed to eleven. The chinking of glasses and tinkling of silverware right out of a Barry Levinson movie. Polite, politically correct banter floats through the dining room like audio oatmeal. You are seated in the very center of the trendiest restaurant in your 'burb and it took weeks to get a reservation.

In these situations, I usually last about five minutes before informing my server that I simply must adjourn to the bar. I can't take it. It's too much.

In fact, that's why I usually eat at the bar. Fabricated environments bother me to no end. So, eating at the bar equals zero pretension in my book. So when I go to when I go to The Angus Barn in Raleigh, I sit and the bar in The Wild Turkey Lounge with my beloved wife and split a hamburger (medium rare) and a nosh on the warm spinach salad. And it's great. Same is true of Lantern in Chapel Hill. We sit at the bar and order the special, whatever it is. And whatever the special is, it is always brilliant. Heck, I did a $150 lunch at the Gramercy Tavern in New York City for my wife's 40th at the bar.

I detest pretension. I do. When I walk into a restaurant, I can sense the vibe immediately. If a restaurateur wants to sell me on how cool I am for being in his or her joint and how cool it is that I can rub elbows with his or her clientele, I generally head for the door. 

I'm sorry. I don't require self-esteem therapy to be served on the side with my meal. The ambiance thing only goes so far before it negatively impacts the culinary experience.

That's why I'm a sucker for road food. Anybody selling his or her wares out of the side of a truck isn't trying to fool you with soft music and candles on every table. This is the kind of food eaten standing up on the sidewalk or in the front seat of your car. And if the person running the truck has the onions to sell his wares without all the trickery baked into the restaurant business, his food must be pretty damn good. Food without pretension works for me.

And the best in The Triangle for my money is Only Burger. Everything made fresh to order, with toppings that run the gamut from the standard to the over the top. Parked in front of the Durham Farmer's Market one Saturday, Her Imperial Majesty, Her Imperial Majesty Junior and I feasted on burgers for breakfast. Junior had hers with ketchup. Mine was done up Carolina style, with chili, mustard, onions and slaw. My beloved went all out, doing a proper breakfast burger, decked out with a fried green tomato, pimento cheese, and an over easy egg. It sounded ridiculous. It tasted ridiculously good. So good in fact, I went back for my own.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely, if, of course, you can track it down. It is a truck after all and trucks have wheels, so it moves around. The best way to do that is to follow them on twitter. And be prepared for lines ten deep that last for hours. It's that good. 

They have announced that they're opening a brick and mortar location. I just hope it doesn't come with soft music and candles on every table.