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November 3, 1995

Cheeseburgers in Paradise: Rounding Up Best Patty-And-Bun Offerings in N.M.

Burger Shootout! Illustration/Cathryn Cunningham Vote on N.M.'s Best Green Chile Cheeseburger here! View poll results

By Fritz Thompson/
Journal Staff Writer
      Fritz 'n' Richard. The names of Journal reporter Fritz Thompson and photographer Richard Pipes often are spoken as one in the newsroom. Sagebrush sidekicks for years, they roam the backcountry of New Mexico looking for good stories to tell from Mayhill or Sheep Springs, Crossroads or Hatchita.
    Road maps, who needs 'em? they boast. Fritz 'n' Richard have eaten their way across the state, making them uniquely qualified to single out some of the finest green chile cheeseburgers in New Mexico.
    In the beginning, there was the lowly cheeseburger. And lo, the people were discontent. "This be far too ordinary," they said. "Yea, even in the vast kingdom of the McDonald's, they are common."
    And the food merchants strove mightily to excite the public taste; they added sauce and mustard and mayonnaise and pickles and tomatoes and lettuce and all manner of condiments.
    Alas, the cheeseburger simply remained the cheeseburger.
    Decades passed.
    The populace became vexed. Anxious. Bored. Restless.
    Unto this burger void came an unknown visionary. He strode boldly from the fields in the south. He bore fruit.
    Green chile, to be exact.
    He (or perhaps it was a she?) roasted it, he peeled it, he sauced it, he sliced and diced it.
    He lauded it.
    And it came to pass that within the realm of New Mexico the green chile and the cheese were united. Their fabled fame spread from town to town, where it soon forged an allegiance with a rather plain pair known as Patty and Bun Hamburger.
    The union was among the culinary milestones of this century.
    Thenceforth this joining and this kinship were celebrated, a melding unequaled in Dallas or Detroit, Butte or Birmingham, Phoenix or Philadelphia.
    And thus the people came to know One Great Truth, and that is this:
    New Mexico is the only place in the world where you can get a decent green chile cheeseburger.
    Setting the standards
    Rating green chile cheeseburgers in New Mexico is admittedly a subjective, arbitrary endeavor. Nevertheless, there are some standards.
    If the chile isn't fresh or fresh frozen and isn't potent enough to open your sinuses or make your eyes water, it should at least leave the pleasant tingle of an after-burn in your mouth. The green chile shouldn't overpower the cheese and vice versa, but the whole package can be ruined by a second-rate meat patty. Sauce probably is not a key; most commonly, it's mustard or mayonnaise and only occasionally homemade. Too heavy on the condiments and the whole thing starts to look suspiciously like something from California.
    But beyond the green chile, cheese, hamburger patty and bun, what to look for?
    A few hints:
    Quality is often commensurate with the number of paper napkins that come with it.
    Be suspicious, but not too suspicious, if the menu spells it chili.
    Beware of the chic, pretentious places, like the one in Taos that serves a green chile cheeseburger on a bagel.
    Do go to places with a sense of humor, intentional or not, like Bert's Burger Bowl in Santa Fe, whose slogan is "One location worldwide," or El Pueblo Cafe in Taos, which is a combination eatery and wrecker service.
    Local manners
    Don't be surprised if you find yourself all alone in the Firehouse Cafe at Mayhill. The owner, the cook and the waitress are volunteer firefighters and when the siren sounds, they all run pell-mell out the door to the fire station next door. (A non-firefighting spouse or part-timer is usually around to finish any burgers still on the grill.) The main work force might not be back for a while, and customers who have been abandoned in mid-meal merely finish eating, wipe down the table and leave their money on the counter.
    Decor can be either entertaining or unnerving, depending on your mindset. Walls at the Outpost Bar and Grill in Carrizozo are adorned with old pistols, steer skulls, snakeskins, bull horns, deerheads, a bobcat, preserved lizards, swords, a bugle, rifles, birds, stuffed squirrels, wagon wheels and barbed wire. The venerable old bar was resurrected from storage in a chicken coop. And this is the place that says it sells some 60 green chile cheeseburgers for lunch every day.
    Guacamole's in Fairacres is closed from January to April so the owner can go sailing; the Hawaiian state flag and a surfboard hang over the front door.
    Dave's Not Here, in Santa Fe, used to be just plain Dave's until Dave vanished — the waitress says he suddenly, totally disappeared. A friend, Annie Baylor, took over, but so many phone calls came in for Dave and Annie got so tired of saying "Dave's not here" that she changed the name to what had become the most repeated phrase in the restaurant.
    Establishments that specialize in green chile cheeseburgers secretly believe the standard is set by the 50-year-old Owl Bar Cafe in San Antonio, N.M. No matter how geographically distant they are from the Owl, some proprietors whisper that "The Owl is our main competition." With such a high profile, the Owl is constantly up for evaluation. There is little middle ground here; people either like it or hate it. Enough like it and swear by it that it's always busy. The patronage is such that a sister cafe was spawned in Albuquerque in 1989.
    At the Little Valley Bar and Grill in Dexter on a recent day, a customer in a gimme cap at the counter allowed as how he never orders the establishment's green chile cheeseburger for lunch. "They're good burgers but they're too big to go back to work on," he said as he consumed a BLT.
    The cook at Lucy's Take Out "(more or less)" specializes in tacos; cooking a green chile cheeseburger was apparently such a departure that he burned the bun. There is no culinary message in "more or less:" it owes to the cook's propensity for finishing every sentence "mas o menos." Surprise: the over-toasted bun made the burger better.
    No place visited was informed of our taste-testing survey until after the green chile cheeseburger was on the table.
    Without fries or a drink, a green chile cheeseburger in New Mexico is also a good buy; prices hover around $3.50; no place in this survey charged more than $5.
   
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