Restaurant: Top Notch Beef Burgers
Intersection: 95th & Hoyne
Rating: 5/5
June 27th, 2011
I feel things strongly. Always have, always will. I think quickly and deeply and I feel strongly. It makes dating next to impossible. A first date is hard when you look 12, but it’s worse when you know that there’s probably no way that they’re feeling anything with the same intensity. You just end up terrified that you’re coming off as a babbling idiot and sticking to the idea that silence is golden. But gold is heavy. Gold is inconveniencing. Gold isn't worth shit if you can't sell it and my tenure selling tickets on Navy Pier proved I'm no salesman.
A poet friend of mine used to live in one of the studios above 1000 Liquors on Belmont & Sheffield. Anyone who’s seen Belmont & Sheffield after 2am, knows what a show it can be, especially after last call at Berlin. We’d get drunk on red wine and stare out her window, watching the streetwalkers and nightcrawlers talk, fight, kiss, transact and all other forms of nocturnal congress. I was fascinated by her and she was fascinated by an Eastern-European prostitute named Ruby.
Every now and then we’d descend to the street to talk to people, or she’d invite them up, like a homeless person who mostly rambled before producing a crack pipe, taking a hit and returning said-pipe mid sentence. This was only fall of last year, but, after an extremely stressful and caffeinated spring, it feels like a millennia ago. I got used to the trees being bare and being able to see her old apartment from the Belmont stop. Maybe I just haven’t turned around in a while, but today I noticed that spring had come and gone and, in the scorching summer sun, I could no longer see that window that our faces frequented. It’s covered by leaves that budded while I wasn’t paying attention. I feel things very strongly and, currently, nostalgia is caving my chest with the vicious accuracy of a firehose in 60s Montgomery.
The redline soon puts me out of my misery and whisks me away, south. The first time I ever noticed the southbound redline ended at 95th, I assumed it ended at the top of some other Chicagoland town. Then I saw that wasn’t how it worked. Numbers didn’t go up in Chicago, they went down, like the south side was doomed to pull away from the north side from the very start. People think Chicago’s full of racial tension, but a redline map will tell you it’s tension by civic design…ok, a lot of it is probably racial, too, but the geography isn’t helping. Up is down, west is flat and east is obstructed, that’s just asking for trouble.
It’s amazing how easily one can zone out on the redline. It seems like I get on at Belmont, start looking at the route map, start listening and all of the sudden I’m at 95th. It’s the highway. I’ve always been able to lose myself in the sides of a highway, the sides of anything, really. When you’re going forward, what’s in front of you never changes, it just gets closer. The stuff on the sides, however, changes at whatever rate you’re traveling. Once at the 95th transitpalooza, I find my way to the 95W bus. Go west, young man.
The far south side of Chicago amazes me with it’s ability to transition so smoothly from suburb to shambles. One intersection is 95th and Normal, looks like a warzone. The next block is a Walgreens, a nice one. It just keeps alternating like this, block by block. I disembark at Hoyne and 95th…and here comes the photo of the sign!
Top Notch Beef Burgers is a wood paneled wonder. It’s a lost world kind of place. I’ve either gone back in time or wandered onto the set of a Scorscese film. It’s just a step off the space time continuum, there’s no real awareness of the outside world.
I take a seat at the end corner of the counter. I like a place that trusts me to sit down and get my own fucking menu. My waitress speeds over with water and cutlery. She’s confused when I ask for a few minutes to look over the menu and I soon learn why. The menu doesn’t really have much except burgers. It’s a lot of burgers and a lot of ways to have a burger and then some greasy spoon essentials. I settle on a single cheeseburger with bacon and fries.
While waiting my food I examine my surroundings a little more. This place is old school Chicago. Founded in 1942, the first full year of the second great war. Some served their country and some served burgers. As I examine a bottle of mustard I notice a technological rarity, the Muzak central brain.
For those of you that don’t know, Muzak has soundtracked your boredom without you knowing it. There are a lot of places that don’t want to have to pay attention to the music in their restaurant/shop/store/airport/elevator/etc. So, they buy Muzak and they have preloaded playlists, and that was the central brain. That’s the actual embodiment of boredom and right now it’s set on 50’s/60’s hits.
From inside my head:
I should’ve gotten a milkshake. What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m at this amazingly retro lost world and I just got a coke? I am a complete fucking jacka-oh my god what is that amazing smell?
My burger is here.
There is no way I can make this burger look like much. It’s a plain looking burger and above-plain looking fries. That’s because this photo can’t capture the pyrotechnic blend of meat and salt and iron, the beautiful burger smells that radiate off this burger like rippling summer pavement. This smell assures me that a lack of milkshake is going to do absolutely nothing to get in the way of this experience. No hesitation, I must take my first bite.
I feel things very strongly, always have, always will. I’m truly paralyzed by how good this burger is. It’s meat. It’s animal. It’s tender. It’s warm. It’s blood and iron and tissue and muscle, ground up with something truly other worldly, but the cheese, the gooey, processed slice of Kraft keeps the whole thing planted in a very real place, dripping with pure Americana. The burger, the fries, all seasoned with the flavors of every single meal that came before them. No, gourmet bun, no fancy cheese, this is just a good burger, unfucked-with. This is how the burger became the hot dog or apple pie. This is how the burger became a staple, places like this.
I have no idea if I ate the burger quickly or slowly, I was lost under the time bending effects of good taste. Eventually, I finish pretty much everything, pay a simple 15ish dollars and depart. Chicago’s an odd beast, travel southwest and you’ll reach heaven. Although, direction is all relative, there’s only forward, if you think you’re going backwards, maybe it’s time to turn around and face forward. I get on the bus to go back to the redline, so I can begin my climb back up to lakeview. After a couple of stops a disheveled man boards the bus, brandishing a bunch of lighters. “Lighters! Lighters for sale, I got lighters! 4th of July! Firework lighters!” A fellow passengers asks him if he has “squares”. “Nope, just lighters. Firework lighters! 4th of July’s coming, gotta have those firework lighters! Everyone loves fireworks. Up, up, up and boom.”
