It’s 8:11 on a weeknight and I want something fast. These are the twilight hours of east bay dining, where Yelp’s constellation of options blinks out one by one, rapidly narrowing your paths to satiation to a devil’s choice between fast food and full-on sit-down experiences. There are no pizza slices, no sandwiches. To get a quick fix, you must go to college.
The Berkeley freshmen landed three weeks ago and Durant is their night market. Here there are a couple dozen quick service restaurants enclosing a narrow artless courtyard packed with benches and tables, all pockmarked wood and pebbly concrete. Students fill every available surface. I, carrying past traumas of scarce menus and lengthy waits, ordered ahead. Mistake. It’s obvious that here you should order with your nose.
I walk. up to IB’s, wait for them to holler, and receive my bag of burger. As I walk over to find a seat, I’m already salivating from the swirling melange of aromas: dim sum, Indian, ramen, tacos, and donuts light up my nostrils against a base fragrance of kitchen steam. It is sensual and confusing. The stage set, I eat.
This burger is America.
The bun is broad and unnaturally springy. It’s too big. There are no sesame seeds, just an honest pad of lightly toasted, slightly yellow bread. It’s chewy, but has a touch of styrofoam crunch. I don’t mind it. It’s a strong foundation physically, and its main job is not to steal the show but to hold its contents through thick and thin (in this case, solely thick).
The innards are generous and familiar. The beef is serviceable: pepper specks play counterpoint against medium-sharp cheddar, supporting an impressive amount of smoke in the thick cut bacon. The bacon is a little lean, firm on the tooth but not too tough. The overall experience is a well-unified umami.
All this meat rests on an underlayment of onion, very thinly cut tomatoes, and a generous bed of shredded lettuce. Here IB’s strengths as a cheesesteak shop shine through. This is classic burger architecture reimagined in the cheesesteak tradition: the vegetables comprise a broad, coherent base, their even layering adding structural strength to the already-resilient bun. More importantly, their flavors are thoroughly wedded to the meat with hot plate grease. The juice of a hundred cuts and patties surround and bind the burger into well-balanced flavor continuum, supporting and celebrating the beef without compromising the crisp bite of the vegetable layer.
Halfway through the burger the raw onion becomes too assertive for me, so I flip it.
I now expect stronger notes of IB’s “burger sauce,” but smoky bacon beefiness is still front and center. Again I find myself putting myself in a cheesesteaker’s shoes, confronting the sauce and thinking, No! This is not why we’re here. Contrast that with the burgerman’s come-from, the archetypal cookout that is every 4th of July: a jumble of ingredients fresh off the cutting board thrown onto a grill-marked patty. On a burger like that, you need a hearty helping of bottlesquirt condiments to make things work. Establishments like Five Guys, In N Out, and McDonalds have all built on that bottlesquirt tradition, creating strong sauces to elevate and differentiate their burgers.
Not so IB. IB has long understood the two-part secret of a good cheesesteak: a happy marriage between cheese and steak. Toppings have their place, and they do help balance and mediate the relationship of these twin columns of taste, but toppings and condiments must never dominate. So too IB’s burger sauce. As anonymous in taste as it is in name, it subtly helps us to make sense of meat and cheese, keeping each centered and connected to the other. It lets us see meat and cheese at their best: big, a little messy, but magnanimous and earnest.
Without the support of their topping and sauce community, meat and cheese might still be together, but their jokes would feel cruel, their smiles strained. It’s only by virtue of every part in balance, expertly set through the casual and infinite iteration of line cooks burgerflips as learned by from their forecooks before them, that this bacon burger achieves it’s full purpose. It is neither revelatory nor profound. But it is big, it is here, and it is a pretty good burger.
