Saturday, May 29, 2010

Cheeseburger Meltdown

As a follow-up to Rus’s article about Hamburger Mary’s, my wife and I went there for dinner tonight. HM is probably my wife’s favorite place for American food in DC and we hadn’t been there in awhile, so she was looking forward to a nice juicy burger.

Unfortunately for us, there was something really off about Mary’s tonight. Our evening started well enough, we got a nice back booth, ordered our burgers. Our food was dropped off after a little while, two perfect looking burgers. As we both picked them up for that first yummy bite we realized that they were not the burgers we had ordered. No biggie. We got our waiter and let him know. That’s when he realized that we had been given the food that the people in the booth behind us had ordered. So off to the kitchen he went, to get them new burgers and to find our order.

So then a guy dropped off two more burgers at our table. I picked mine up and it wasn’t what I ordered. My wife’s order was wrong too. That’s when the people at the table next to us realized that we had their food! So we got the waiter again and he headed back to the kitchen to get them new burgers and to find our food.

My wife and I, and the folks sitting around us, all shared an awkward laugh about it. Hey, it’s friday night, what’s the rush right? That’s when we saw a patron looking pissed, march up the ramp, burger in hand, back to the kitchen. Followed by another and another. As our burgers finally, mercifully arrived an angry mob of people had formed outside the kitchen window all claiming they had been given the wrong burgers too! It all got a little loud, but after that first delicious bite of my perfect Bacon BBQ Burger all their yapping blended into the 80’s backbeat coming over HM’s sound system as I entered burger nirvana.

While their ordering system may have gone haywire tonight it was nice to find, once our order finally arrived, that even amidst chaos Hamburger Mary’s can still cook up a damn fine burger in the clutch.

Originally published on September 17, 2005.

Hamburger Mary's DC is no longer in business.

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