It's hard to think of a burger more perfectly crafted to suit my tastes than this one. "But I love a diner burger, one that's greasy and has a lot of onions." Me too. "Perhaps I'm of an older generation," says Shields. That's just the way chef John Shields wanted it.
Thanks to the extra-juicy meat, soft bun and mob of onions, the burger almost comes off like an oversized slider - the kind you'd find at some classic roadside diner.
You bet it features meat ground in-house, combining short rib and chuck with ground bacon, for a ludicrously fatty patty. Instead of some pretentious bun, this one gets a soft hamburger roll coated in more sesame seeds than McDonald's probably has in its U.S. The restaurant's cheeseburger, known colloquially as the Dirty Burg, embraces the power of three kinds - raw, charred and pickled - to add bite, sweetness and acid to each bite. No restaurant in town understands how crucial onions are to burgers as thoroughly as The Loyalist. The best weren't just good, they somehow achieved greatness. In fact, the standard in this town is frighteningly high. There's not a burger on this list without them.įor transparency, and to hopefully ward off unnecessary emails from clogging my inbox, I'll list all the places I visited but that didn't make the top 25. They add crunch and sharpness when raw, and savory sweetness when caramelized. Before this quest, I thought of them like backup singers - a great addition to a band, but not exactly essential. That said, onions play a far more important role than I ever imagined. Quality matters, but so do construction skills. That explains how a dive bar burger at less than $5 can satisfy more than a $20 monstrosity downtown. It's about how all those combine into something better. But a burger is not just about the beef, nor is it about the toppings and the bun. You should be able to pick a burger apart, to examine every element, and it should taste good. But slowly over the course of the month, I realized that there are many kinds of great burgers, both big and small, spare and complex, and that the summit of burger mountain can be reached by innumerable paths. You, no doubt, have definite opinions on the right kind of cheese, toppings and bun for the perfect burger. That's definitely the case here, where one-upmanship has led to a burger scene stuffed with a wild assortment of styles and sizes. Lavish this much attention on any food, and you'll end up with fascinating results. Chicago may be famous for its hot dogs and pizza, but more chefs obsess over the burger, from the tiniest fast food stand to the fanciest downtown hotel. No dish comes close to matching the burger's all-encompassing popularity. But at this moment in the quest, this list comprises Chicago's 25 best, ranked from least to best. New burger spots keep opening, and I still have a group of 50 places or so that I need to eventually get to. I made it to 71, which I think is sufficiently crazy for a month of work. Though I tried my best, no human could or should eat every burger in Chicago. To do so, I knew I'd have to eat more than a lot. In January, I had challenged myself to find the best burger in Chicago. (Call it burger enlightenment, if you will.) But I felt lucid and sharp, closer than ever to understanding the mystery of America's favorite food. You'd imagine that devouring so many would result in some fat-fueled nightmare, that grease would have clogged my brain and saturated my blood stream. Right around my 50th burger, I began to dream in ground beef.