Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Laborious Wrap-Up, plus the Burger with Everything
Welcome back from what I can only hope was a relaxing and triumphant holiday weekend for each and every one of you. We here in the US enjoyed Labor Day, but do not under any circumstances assume that this makes us soft on communism. Those are capitalist laborers we celebrated, and specifically, the ones who either came here legally or arrived without documentation so long ago that it doesn’t matter any more. At a barbeque party yesterday we stood, tipsy and overfed, on the front lawn late in the afternoon, admiring the landscaping that had been done the day before by an obviously hard-working contractor named Mr Molina. At that moment Mr Molina himself drove past, in a dirty truck with four non-european-looking laborers and a whole mess of tools and supplies in the back. Everybody looked filthy and exhausted, but Molina honked cheerfully. That’s the labor we should be honoring - the guys who are landscaping our lawns on Labor Day. But I digress.
At the Labor Day BBQ we ate marinated pork tri-tip and sausages and Neiman ranch hot dogs, king salmon and halibut from alaska, and a wide variety of supporting delicacies (such as Kel’s chocolate-chip banana brownies with pure chocolate frosting). In addition, on Sunday we went to a birthday party for a family with a two-year-old and a forty-year-old who were due for a celebration. At that party I enjoyed both mexican and el salvadorean chorizo, plus jimmy dean sausages and plenty of fresh housemade pizza and fritatta espagna and bagels with lox and numerous other gustatory delights. It wasn’t healthy eating, but it sure felt good.
It felt especially good on the heels of getting, in the mail on Friday, a big envelope from my buddies at LabCorp. Two weeks after returning from Wilkes-Barre and the literal sausage-fest that was held there in our honor, I had yet another blood test to see how close I am to clogging up my own heart with a fistful of solidified lipids. The answer appears to be: not so terribly close! My total cholesterol has gone down from an all-time high of 310 to a mere wisp of a 166. LDL is around 75 (my target was to get it under 100) and my HDL is around 65 (which is actually a good, high number). This, together with my recent heart scan that revealed very low levels of calcium buildup and a consequently medically “trivial” risk of gasping redfaced death, means that I am actually heart-healthy. Healthy enough, perhaps, even to have the occasional carnitas burrito again (as opposed to the grilled chicken), or to stop taking the pills every day that have been, I think, making me feel like someone injected me with meat tenderizer. I am anathrosclerotic and I’m proud. And I chose to celebrate by eating every form of pork I could get my hands on.
All of this reminds me of a story having to do with food I cannot in good conscience call healthy. But I don’t care. Life is too short to be healthy all the time. Therefore, I bring you:
Burger with Everything
I’m going to say this as a person who gets pretentious about cheap hamburgers: Kewpie is the real deal. There may not be much else going on in Lima, Ohio, but if you want a burger, Kewpie is what you are looking for. It’s been around since the ‘20s, and while their Westgate Mall location may claim to be the most profitable food retailing space in the contiguous 48 or whatever they allege along those lines, the real old fashioned Kewpie experience is the downtown location. At one time in the way-back days, this particular shop was so popular that they even installed a turntable in their narrow driveway so cars could move through more efficiently - and the line still blocked traffic.
At the downtown Lima Kewpie, a giant plaster babydoll stands above the entryway and waves to you from behind deliciously untroubled eyes, ten feet tall and streaked with midwest grime, speaking unequivocally: Your grandpa ate here, and he liked it, too. I’ve gone there for a ground beef fix every time I’ve been in L-Town, and that’s more times than most folk’ll admit to.
So okay: I was in Lima not too may years ago and I found myself downtown and hungry. It was just too obvious: I had to get me a Kewpie - the whole deal: burger, fries and frosty. I walked in and immediately felt surrounded by 80 years or so of history caked to the walls and puddling up out of the floor. Don’t get me wrong - Kewpie maintains a sanitary facility. It’s a first-rate burger. But the lore felt so thick I could have stumbled over it.
Alright then: I walk, as I say, into Kewpie in downtown Lima. I check the board - for prices, mainly, since the menu doesn’t really change. I place my order and am asked, “You want your burger with everything?”
The question catches me by surprise somehow. I don’t recall hearing it here before but my memory is notoriously fickle so I roll with it. “No mayo,” I answer. “Everything but mayo.”
“Olives?”
“You put olives on a Kewpie?”
“If you order it with everything, we do.” The clerk’s bordom Is on the verge of transitioning into irritation. Heaven forbid that I irritate a Kewpie clerk I’ll never see again, I speedily perform a quick mental review: I like olives. If they offer olives, they must think they’re good on a Kewpie - at least, if you like olives in the first place, which I do, so I figure: okay, what the hell, olives.
“Yeah, give me the olives.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” As the redcapped burgermacher turns away with the full measure of professionalism to which she can lay claim, I feel a gleaning sense of victory. I may not get up to the Kewpie often, but when I do, I can Kewpie right along with the best of them.
While I wait, I reacquaint myself with the little historical Kewpie timeline they’ve got set up around the lobby - a few photos, some apparently deep-fried newsprint, some specially-typewritten index cards. It’s a charming little display. It takes me 30 seconds to get bored with it, and 45 before my order comes up.
“Burger w’olives, frosty, fries.”
It’s my order, but, again, focus falls on the olives. It gets me thinking. The olives seem to be a complicating factor.
I take my order to a little booth and get settled: the tidy little burger positively grins up at me with the face of the trademark Kewpie girlbaby printed on the waxed burgerwrap paper . I push the straw into the frosty; I puddle some ketchup for the fries on a corner of the unfolded paper wrapper… all is in readiness. The burgering can commence.
I heft my preciousss, and take a bite.
Damn. That is olivey.
I take a few more bites. I think, each time, that I’m exaggerating the oliveocitude. It just can’t be that olivacious, I persuade myself. It’s cool. Just bite the burger. And then: Damn. That is a lot of olives. Green ones, pickled tart and chopped coarsely. I like olives well enough, but this borders on abuse.
A little past halfway through my burger I find myself at a purist’s impasse. I’m in a truly authentic burger place, eating the food they’re famous for, just as they eat it themselves. Plus, I like olives. Plus, I don’t want to earn the disrespect - if not, indeed, the ennmity - of the burger clerk behind her shabby counter. But this is just too olivoid for me. It’s hard to eat such intensely condimentacious food. Dare I breach the bunly integrity of my Kewpieburger, and actually remove an olive or two?
I take another bite and a wave of briny gorge rolls up my gullet, fighting the oliveocity. I force down my mouthful of overdressedburger, which I cannot taste. Defeated, I open the bun.
The top of what remains of my burger is an unbroken blanket of bilious-green chunks. Olives are equal to or greater than burger in both mass and volume. This kind of smothering is not the work of a well-meaning, or even careless, burger builder. It is malicious, pure and simple, and I ate two-thirds of it anyway. From the remaining bit I pluck more than thirty pieces of olive. Each chunk is a mote in my eye. Metaphorically, I mean. They weren’t really in my eye; they were just lying on the burger wrapper, curled like worms on the printed face of a Kewpiegirl grinning vacantly at me from the tabletop.
I reassembled my burger but I couldn’t taste it anymore. All I tasted, for hours thereafter, was those olives. I’ve been back to Kewpie since then and enjoyed a quality burger there, but I sort of still taste those olives even now.
MORAL: Even if you like olives, sometimes you oughtn’t order them. Now get back to work.
