Road Food.

So I did the math on this. Sat down, got out the legal pad, crunched the numbers. I have been to In-N-Out one billion times. I’ve spent so much of my life there that I have to earnestly say it’s part of my identity as a Californian. Which I don’t like admitting, because the place is so profoundly, suspiciously mythologized. The half-drunk celebs going there after award shows. The t-shirts, the hats, the shoes. The palm trees out front. The fake secret menu. It can feel like a satellite campus of Disneyland, so iconic it’s not to be trusted. Every other fast food joint has lost or pivoted its brand identity with time, and here’s exactly one holdout with a fanbase that can get radioactively cultish.

What’s hard to see if you’re visiting from out of state, or if you go to one of their blockbuster openings in places like Utah, is that they’ve always been the only 100% reliable place to get food if you’ve been on the road all day and you’re sweaty and exhausted and broke. Sometimes it’s the only thing in town that’s open, and it’s often the only place that’s clean. If you roll into Merced for gas at 10 at night, you can confidently say “this is the best thing I can possibly be doing in Merced right now.”

The food is fine. The real trick is just that the overall experience is balanced. That burger has the exact right amount of stuff a burger should have, almost cartoonishly so. The ingredients are fresh and it’s an acceptable amount of unhealthy. You’re guaranteed to get the exact same product at every location. And they don’t overload the menu. If you’re there, you know what you’re doing. You’re off the road for half an hour. 

I don’t even think it’s the best. I don’t really care. It’s more that it’s a platonic ideal of the postwar roadside California burger (they invented the drive-thru). A California burger should be dead basic, like a Chuck Berry song. Meat, cheese, bread, etc. You should be able to eat two, and they should be kind of cheap and smallish. Not terribly messy. This is the exact kind of thing that used to populate our highways that takes you back right to the beginning of fast food as a concept, as a new luxury for the working class. Cheeseburgers have been ruined by gimmicks, and the trick to the perfect California burger is to not have any.

I didn’t really grow up with restaurants. Not just because of the money, but because they were seen as bad, dated, a crapshoot, places to get food poisoning (there are few things in California that can be sadder, more haunted than a midcentury steakhouse). When my grandparents drove on Route 66, they never stopped at any of those cute diners with neon signs, they just packed Vienna sausages and Saltines. But they made an exception for fast food when it started to explode in Southern California specifically. There was this new promise of reliability, that you could just get a sack of cheeseburgers and that’ll take care of the problem of road food.

As much as I dig the uptown dignity of In-N-Out, what I most remember was piling into the Grenada to go to places that were glorified shacks, places with like freeze or frosty or root beer in the name. Places I’d go with my dad when he handled auto claims; that distinct ambiance of back offices with five year old calendars on the wall and the doors don’t shut anymore and the bathroom is a closet with a toilet that was never even new when it was old. Some of the best burgers I’ve ever eaten tasted almost like they were grilled on the hood of some old Okiemobile. 

It’s an experience I’m always looking for and I apologize for nothing because food is one of the least embarrassing places to get nostalgia out of your system. It always winds up feeling like chasing ghosts; old parts of town, mechanic’s rows, tough old neighborhoods that won’t be rebuilt when they burn down. It’s always haunting when I find one of these places and it’s good. They never feel like they’re really in business. You half expect to see dead relatives at the counter. “Oh, so that’s where you’ve been hiding since 1993.” And they’re getting harder to find, as people who came of age in blue collar postwar California rapidly die off.

The best one I’ve ever found is Bill’s Burgers in Van Nuys. Been there since the ‘60s. Surrounded by mechanics. It’s the best cheeseburger I’ve ever eaten. I don’t know why. Sense memory is part of it but there are intangibles. Perfect condiment balance. Uncomplicated taste of meat. A well-seasoned ancient grill that looks like it magically appeared one day in a junkyard. Why is No Particular Place to Go one of the greatest American songs? Because it just does exactly what it needs to.

It might be the most crotchety business in all of Southern California. There’s not really any seating. The building looks like it could have been a gas station and there’s no cute vintage signage. They’re only open four days a week and they’re only open from 9 am to 4 pm. There’s some fun in the challenge of getting there because the line can be huge, you sort of have to have the day off, and it’s always 105 in Van Nuys especially if it isn’t. It’s cash-only, always packed, they run out of food, and they have an unaffected “what do you want,” “that,” “eight bucks” attitude that isn’t even cute for tourists. They’re not rough, they’re just kind of jerks in a way that feels like time travel.

It’s run by this guy named Bill Elwell but really, his name is just Bill. Works with one of his ex-wives. Charitably, he is in his mid-hundreds, and he always struck me as a true icon of the old San Fernando Valley, when it was beaters and farmland. An almost obsolete but very specific kind of hardass you know when you see it. He claims to be a WWII veteran. He told a buddy of mine that two of his sons died. One in a shootout following a drug deal gone bad under the pier, one from going into shock getting his back tattooed too soon after getting his torso tattooed. I’m pretty sure these are Rockford Files or Law & Order episodes specifically, but never mind.

After going there for years, one day he very deliberately came up to me and said he liked my boots. It was the longest conversation I ever heard him have. Apparently a reporter with the Los Angeles Times or some such tried to profile him for a piece called “The Best Burger in America.” Kept coming, Friday after Friday, until he finally told her to fuck herself. Another time, Jack Black came by with Mr. T, or maybe they came separately, whatever, and someone told Bill those guys were really famous and it could be great publicity. He said he didn’t fucking care and didn’t wanna hear about it. 

I highly recommend this place to anyone who wants a living snapshot of the kind of roadside burger that was perfected in this state, best eaten when you are dirty. Actually wait that’s not true and go to hell while you’re at it. But even more than In-N-Out, it feels like a miraculous historical outlier, a reminder of the kind of place we used to be and what we used to do. It also actually is the best cheeseburger anyone has ever made, but that’s none of your business.