Greg Puglese
It’s a sign of Madison’s food awareness that where to find the best bar burger is a frequent conversation starter. Good bars aren’t just for their respective neighborhoods — people will travel across the city for the right bar and a worthy bite to eat.
Madison’s most well-known bar burger, both to locals and visitors, is likely the Plazaburger. The Plaza Tavern takes a modest patty and bun (and pickle slices on the side, of course) and by grace of both the classic Wisco surroundings and a dollop of enigmatic Plaza sauce, turns it into a classic bar burger.
The brick burger at the Village Bar is similarly well known. Brick cheese doesn’t show up on any other burgers. The cheapo paper plate it’s served on brooks no pretension. The brick burger is required reading for Madison burger literacy. (Speaking of burger literacy, American burger historian George Motz featured the Village’s brick burger on his Burger Land series for Travel Channel in 2012 and included the Plazaburger in his 2011 book, Hamburger America.)
Neither of these burgers are particularly large. But there’s a crowd of other Madison bar burgers that get downright beefy. I’m talking big burgers. Irresponsibly big burgers. Greasy, messy, pleasure-center-of-your-brain-satisfying burgers.
The Blue Moon Bar and Grill’s Doug Brown credits a couple factors to the Blue Moon burger’s success. One, a custom blend of higher-fat Knoche’s ground beef — “a special blend we came up with about 20 years ago,” he says — that’s delivered fresh five to six days a week. Two, a flat-top grill to keep the patty from losing all its juicy goodness through grill grates. Three, the technique.
Laura Zastrow
Garlic blue cheese is an apropos topping for the Blue Moon burger.
“Sear it, flip it once and cook to temp,” he says. The result is a hefty, juicy, minimally seasoned burger that can occasionally be a handful to fit in even the hungriest mouth. One of the saddest food days I ever had was when I stopped at the Blue Moon and the grill was down for the day due to malfunction.
Of course, the Blue Moon isn’t alone in using a flat top. Players Sports Bar in Schenk’s Corners has one too. Players offers a lot of burger variations with complex recipes, including weekly specials, but the basic bacon cheeseburger is nothing to sniff at either. There’s plenty of cheese, and it looked like the bacon might even be deep-fried. The burger’s interior was perfectly pink, just how I ordered it.
No burger, not by a country mile, was as physically imposing as the one-pound specimen on offer at the Eagle Crest out east of town on County T. The nest of very crispy bacon on top was more than any other bar cranked out, but for as massive, juicy and irregularly shaped as the patty was, it never fell apart. Never got messy. I didn’t have room in my mouth to form questions about what the Eagle Crest crew is proud of, but the burger’s size and seasoning speak for themselves.
The regulars at Chicken Lips outside Sun Prairie will tell you plenty about the bacon cheeseburger there. When my wife ordered one (while I put in my order for the famous wings), they told her she made the better move. While I had no complaints about my wings, the burger (juicy patty, crispy bacon, sturdy bun) was indeed worth coming back for.
At Brothers Three, I chatted a bit with one of the wonderful waitresses before being referred to Rick, standing in cook’s whites, near the kitchen. He never introduced himself as Rick Sawyer, the owner of the place, but that’s who he was. He said he’s proud of their fresh beef, the Gardner’s buns “from right up the street,” and the thick, double-smoked bacon. I can attest to all of that and to the burger’s size. Brothers Three is one of those enduring secrets of the Madison burger scene, and is maybe my favorite bar in which to order a burger.
While Brothers Three feels a little like your grandparents’ basement, the Paradise is an old Wisconsin bar. It’s dark. There are daub-and-wattle walls. And there are shingles on the inside of the building (as decoration?). The officially named Paradise burger doesn’t have a special sauce or anything, it just includes bacon and all the veggies by default. That bacon is excellent, worth the add-on, and the burger has nice jaggly edges that pick up char from the grill.
Easily the most no-nonsense burger came from the Caribou. ’Bou burgers are classics in Madison. Even though the bartender was working alone at 10:30 at night, she still turned out three orders like clockwork before the grill shut off at 11. This is bun-burger-cheese territory; there are pickle slices on the side, which I recommend adding. Ketchup and mustard optional. There were plenty of reasons to be worried — the overworked bartender, the patties that looked like they might stick to the grill, and a quick squish with a spatula before plating — but this was pure bar burger goodness.
Certainly, not every bar I visited had guys as chatty as the Blue Moon, Players or Brothers Three. Chip Cantwell, co-owner of the Oakcrest Tavern, exclaimed more than once, “I’m not really the interviewing type, sorry!” But he did mention that the across-the-street proximity of Knoche’s butcher shop is a boon to the Oakcrest patty. The char-grilled flavor is pronounced here, and there are two sizes of patty available. Plus, soccer on the TV, if you’re into that.
At the Harmony Bar, my bacon cheeseburger came with a velvety blanket of melted American cheese and a nicely toasted bun, and it was one of the tidier burgers of the bunch. But line cook Lenny Johnson, bless his heart, looked like I was asking him to recite the last three State of the Union addresses from memory when I spoke with him.
“Well, it’s nothing fancy,” he said of the Harmony burger. That was about all I got out of him, but it’s pretty accurate. If you want fancy, I submit that a bar burger is not what you should be ordering. Their simplicity is why they’re great.