Cap'n Dave, No one gives a damn about wineburgers. Get the picture? This one, like all of your series so far, is a big flop. Please stick to the one-shot method--that's what you're good at. Now stop sniveling or get a real job. Snades
Phoenix
P.S. Thanks for all the good tips over the years. About a month ago I launched what I thought would be a simple little time-killing exercise called the Wineburger Wander. The plan was to visit several local dives that serve hamburgers cooked with red wine. It was going to be a sleepwalk. In, eat, out, write. Only secondarily did I expect to learn anything significant about the wineburger itself or its local history. But the wineburger, it turns out, is bigger than all of us.
My investigation of the wino phenomenon took me from ancient Rome to 16th Street, via New York City, Chicago, Iowa, and, as expected, Mars. Readers sent me tips that led to the unraveling of the wineburger saga, a truly cool tale. Through these letters, none of which I made up, I got to meet all kinds of interesting characters, and I learned a lot about the folks--Harvey Woodrow, Tom Tarbox and others--who put Phoenix on the wineburger map. A few weeks ago I wanted an excuse to eat grilled meat in dark places. Now I'm on the cover of New Times with a salad on my head. What I've assembled here will have to serve, at least until someone else wants to do it better, as the last word in wineburger lore. So. Welcome to the Official Celebration of the Wineburger Special Section. A team of Air Force skydiving experts will be landing soon with the game ball. Then Gordie Howe will come out of retirement to sing the national anthem. Then we'll start. Dear Cap'n Dave: Your pieces about wineburgers intrigued me. I would like to enlighten you about how this got started. During the Renaissance, the chefs of Rome had a very strong guild. A part of their contract had a provision that they would be entitled to all the wine they could drink while on duty. Being true Romans, lovers of the fermented grape and not able to resist free vino, it got so that by dinnertime most of the culinary goombahs were so inebriated that they couldn't tell the difference between their Asti Spumanti and a hole in the ground.
This prompted so many complaints about the lousy food, that the senators passed a law that prohibited wine drinking by chefs while on duty. Because they had access to wine for cooking purposes, they were closely watched to ensure that they would not imbibe. Now everyone knows that chefs are a very ingenious breed and in no time at all they invented "smart wine." The way smart wine is employed (or deployed) is that whenever wine was added to the food, a bit of it was spilled on the fire. (You must remember that they didn't have grills in those days.) As the alcohol content and essence of the wine rose from the fire in a cloud of steam, they would breathe deeply. Centuries later, when grills and electricity were invented, the chefs would merely spill the wine on the grill and momentarily turn the exhaust fan off so as to get the full benefit of the "snort" without competition from the exhaust fan.
I suggest that if you check the lineage of the grill jockeys who build wineburgers, you will find an old Roman skeleton in their distant past. As you travel from joint to joint, be on the lookout for grill masters who carelessly (?) spill wine on the grill and momentarily flip the exhaust fan switch off and on again. Listen for the heavenly sighs of bliss as they inhale deeply. What really irks me about all this is, you are paying for the wine and they are having all the fun. This was related to me by an old Italian who consumed more than his share of the vino. Subsequently, he was buried beneath an old vineyard. The vines are getting even!
Thomas
Phoenix
Romans, eh? True or not, this theory, which arrived on one of the first notes sent in from readers, sparked the beginning of my investigation. The old Italian's story seemed comparatively believable and, narrative-wise, it was a great place to start. By opening this letter, I had traced the wineburger's lineage essentially back to premodern times. My next step was to take this admittedly shaky archaeology and relate it to the wine-soaked belly bombs they're serving today over on 16th Street, the heart of the local wineburger territory. Everybody knows that Italian food has wine in it. But how did wine make the big leap to burgerdom? Fortunately, another letter came in to clarify things. Dear Cap'n Dave, In regards to how the wineburger was made, I asked a knowledgeable friend. He said that one afternoon this man (known hereafter as Bob) was having a barbecue in his back yard. While sipping a large glass of wine and attempting to flip the burgers, Bob was hit with a soccer ball by his son. He dumped his wine on the burgers and called them wineburgers. Anyhow, Bob's burgers were a raging success and he started the trend. Later, Jim Scottsdale
As you might expect, I was totally satisfied with this explanation. It had a lot of things I like in a yarn. There was action, flames, drinking, high adventure--even a guy named Bob. There also was a great degree of vagueness, a quality I admire in fact-finding scholarship. A set of facts such as this, presented as a folk legend or mythology or just so much hot air, is impossible for editors to question. Wine and burgers got together by accident! It was a fluke! The coupling came about via the intervention of a just and righteous deity and/or visiting residents of another galaxy who wanted to use our planet as an experiment of some kind! My preliminary research was complete. Then the next letter came in, and, social scientist that I am, I was forced to rethink some of my preliminary findings.
Dear Dave: Yes, of course: I know all about wineburgers. A synthesis of its vital, compelling history (yawn) is in order. It all started around Manhattan's 88th Street-West End Avenue area, an enclave of old-country culture, pickles, laundry flapping window-to-window, all that. The two principals are Maury Weinberger, a failing optometrist who couldn't see eye-to-eye with his daughter Zelda, who had run away to Decatur; and Abe Keppelman, Maury's distant nephew and continuing annoyance. Maury had maintained an unremitting series of put-downs, directed at his nephew's blatant lack of class. You know--lousy table manners, white socks, bad breath, all the social graces of furry primates. One day, fed up (sorry) with watching Abe char-fry his fifth hamburger, Maury jumped up from a velveteen armchair, lurched to the stove and poured/splattered a bottle of wine--that cheap turista, Chianti-in-a-basket dreck--over the fossilized meat. "There," Maury exclaimed. "At last you've got something with a little zing, a little flair."
Abe, chewing, said, "Alors, Weinberger, I think we have something here." Etc., etc. And so the Weinberger Wineburger was created. Word got around. Ever thine, William
Florence
Of course, this letter almost threw a great big bucket of water on my once-scalding enthusiasm for the project. William of Florence seems to contradict the wineburger-as-cosmic-accident theory. He also places the wineburger at a specific time and place in history. And he includes quotes, leading me to suspect that he could have been physically present at the scene. I mean, nobody would make up an exchange like that, would they? Until this letter arrived, I was pretty confident that the wineburger had antecedents cooked by hard-drinking Italian cooks. I was sold on the fact that its modern manifestation was prompted by an accidental melding of ingredients, either in someone's backyard or in someone's apartment on the East Coast. I would swear on a stack of phone books that this melding was due almost certainly to extraterrestrial intervention. I decided it was too late in the project to let the interjection of factual information sway me from my mission. I decided to ignore William's letter. My decision began to look pretty good when the next day's mail came. Dave, In the 1970s, there used to be a restaurant in New York City on 56th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues that was called something like "Hamburgers of the World." They served wineburgers along with others made in crazy ways. Maybe that's where it started. Joe Phoenix
Wineburgers, being sold in New York, in the 1970s! I got chills. In only a couple of days of digging, I had established a contemporary American base for wineburger production. My next challenge was to get those winos westward. Wagons ho!
Cap'n Dave:
Did someone mention wineburgers? Wineburgers in the Valley? Hot damn, it might be worth living here after all!!
I grew up in the Quad Cities, a metropolitan area on the Mississippi River. In one of the "cities" (there were four), Davenport, Iowa, to be exact, there was a dark rock 'n' roll bar known as Al's Lounge, and they billed themselves as "Home of the Wineburger." I hung around one of the bands that played there on weekends, and it took a while to get the courage to try one of these things. After all, we jokingly referred to the place as "Al's Scrounge, Home of the Slimeburger."
But, oh, once I tried one! It was one-third pound of beef with Gallo Port wine liberally applied and served with crinkle-cut fries cooked extra crunchy. They also served a "Hazelburger," which was the same meat 'n' wine with a slice of jack cheese served between two slices of toasted rye bread. Also a favorite. I don't know if wineburgers originated there, but my love for 'em did. Unfortunately, I learned during my last visit to the Q.C.'s that Al's Lounge, which had changed names several times, is now closed. Most likely because the band sucked, not the food. That's about it. Hope it helps!
K. Tempe
So not long after wineburgers were being peddled in New York, they were spotted in Iowa. The migration toward Arizona had begun. It occurred to me here that a secondary research project, specifically an analysis of the addition of cheese to the wineburger ("Hazelburgers," etc.), might be an easy sell to the many grant-giving food corporations around the country. I was filling out the usual grant applications when the phone rang. It was Deborah Cox, our department's czarina of mail and phone messages. Mail call! Dear Cap'n Dave, You asked for it, you got it. WINEBURGER NEWS
Where I almost grew up, Knoxville, Iowa, there was a fine line between greaseburgers and gut sludge. The former were made from moderately fresh-ground farm animals and were slick but edible. The latter were recycled leftovers, with a metallic, rancid flavor, and included the infamous wineburger. THE BIRTH OF AN ABOMINATION Down at the Ray-O-La, on the corner of First and Main, a cook that looked like Barney Fife was in charge of turning low-grade cow parts into greaseburgers. She was real good at it, but sometimes came to work drunk. She'd show off on the noon shift by grilling maybe a dozen greaseburgers at a time, Knoxville's 1962 answer to fast food. Trouble was, she always managed to have a few greasy Bs that failed to sell. So she'd wrap them in an old apron or newspaper or something and hide them in a King Edward cigar box so the boss wouldn't see the waste. (Sometimes she'd forget about them for a few days before tossing them out or crumbling them in the chili du jour.) Then she'd stumble to the T. & G. for a couple racks of shitass on the snooker table and a few beers before returning to the Ray-O-La for the trucker run on the midnight shift. One night, as the story goes, she shanghaied a bottle of cheap red wine from the T. & G. to maintain her buzz. A sudden rush of surly truckers left her short on the Ray-O-La grill, so she got the stash out of the Prince Edward box and slapped 'em on the heat. Things were going well, until the boss caught her uncorking the red for a snort. "What the hell is that?" he asked. "For the burgers," she said, and poured a generous dose of buzz on the secondhand greasy Bs. "What the hell is that?" said the truck driver on the center stool. (At the time, vocabulary was limited, but very much to the point, in Knoxville.)
The cook looked at the trucker, at her boss, at the bubbling purple grease and at the bottle and said, "Wineburgers."
"I want one," said the truck driver. The next day, a sign in the window of the Ray-O-La read: WINEBURGERS 40 CENTS. The truckers were tickled. They thought the peculiar taste was due to the wine instead of the age and decomposition of the meat. But the locals boycotted the joint because of the ill effect that wine in a public place would have on their children and the collection plates at church. So the cook and her vino cuisine were run out of town, much to the dismay of the truckers and the T.& G.
HAPPY ENDING? The cook in question surfaced some years later in a joint about a block from the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa, near the Bettendorf city line. She had sobered up some, but carried the gut sludge tradition with her. The last time I drove by the place, a couple of years ago, a huge plastic sign out front read, "Home of the Wineburger."
The Ray-O-La has been out of business for some years now, closed simultaneously by the health department and the vice squad. Anyway, I've been calling a few folks to try and get the address of the Davenport joint. I've forgotten what the real name of the place is, but I think it's on Rockingham Road. Hey, you don't believe me? Check it out. The best, Greg
Mesa
We researchers call this kind of data corroboration. We also call it a laugh riot. Two letters, in one week, mentioning wineburger sightings in a dink town called Davenport, Iowa. I immediately booked plane tickets to Davenport. Then I canceled, and made reservations to the Nobel Prize awards dinner. After all, I had established not only that wineburgers were sold and eaten in the American Midwest, but also that they might have been invented via "spontaneous combustion" in two different places. I quickly adopted Greg of Mesa's theories as my own, chiefly because they were entertaining as all heck. The next day's mail delivered yet another breakthrough. Dave, Okay, Wonderful Wino. Time to get you off the hook, or is that the sauce? The wineburger got its start from an old W.C. Fields flick. The name of the movie skips my memory. But it was picked up by a restaurant or disco in Chicago called Mother's, located around Rush Street. These burgers were a wee bit different. Perhaps you should try making up a batch or come over one Saturday and I will make us a few burgers. Take ground round, about 2 pounds. Add finely diced onions, a pinch of salt, black pepper, 1/4 cup of Burgundy and about a cup of Progresso bread crumbs. Knead. Form into patties. Fire up those charcoals, put in some wet hickory chips, and cook them suckers. Serve on your favorite rolls.
That's it,
Jim
Phoenix
This placed the wineburger on Rush Street, inside a bar that I had visited in person several times in the past, thus giving me my most tangible lead yet. At least it gave me my first easy-to-validate fact. Should some other academic type question my findings at a national wineburger conference, I can always point to Mother's and say, "I been there."
Meanwhile, I found the W.C. Fields theory intriguing, and I considered checking that out some more, but it would have taken a couple of years for all of W.C.'s movies to cycle around on TV, so I decided to ditch it in favor of pursuing the recipe angle. For the first time, I had discovered wineburger-related facts that went beyond the grilled-burger-splashed-with-cheap-red-wine preparation approach. I had already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the wineburger was a product of culinary creationism, and sightings had been made in several locations. Now, I was poised to research the evolutionary aspects of the burger's development. Clearly, someone along the line had begun to tinker with the wino's components. I vowed to redouble my efforts at finding further evidence of experimentation within the basic wineburger recipe. It was almost lunchtime when this happened, so I decided to take a break and wait to see what the afternoon mail would bring. MDULDave: From the 1962 edition of the Sunset barbecue cookbook. Try it!
Burgundy Burgers
3/4 pound ground chuck
2 tablespoons each chopped parsley and green onion
3/4 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
1/3 cup dry red wine
Roquefort or blue cheese
Mix together ground chuck, chopped parsley and green onion; season with salt and pepper. Shape into two patties, making a depression in the center of each one. Place in a shallow pan, and pour wine over patties, pouring it into the depressions; chill two hours or longer. Broil over medium-hot coals, eight to ten minutes for medium-rare. Place a square of Roquefort or blue cheese on each meat patty just before serving so it will melt slightly. Makes 2 servings. Kenny
Phoenix
P.S. From the Weber BBQ cookbook: 2 pounds hamburger
3 tablespoons onion
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper 3/4 cup uncooked rolled oats
1/4 cup Burgundy
Mix, shape into patties, refrigerate until ready. This letter and its postscript brought the recipe-hunting segment of my research to a close. My next step was to trace the earliest wineburger sightings in Arizona. I already had plenty of existing evidence. Several joints around town serve wineburgers to this day--duh!--which I knew from having spent my summer visiting them. I knew that many old-time patrons of those joints were still kicking, despite many years of sitting around wineburger joints and consuming wineburger-joint products, such as beer and, well, lots of wineburgers. I knew that these people would be willing to help me. I knew that it was about time for me to quit for the day and get a beer. By the next morning, another wineburger letter was in my mail slot. Dear Cap'n Dave, I was all set to write to you last week. However, I feared that I had an eligibility problem as I am 71 years old and female. Not your usual fan. So why take the "bull by the bottle" today? Because somebody has to tell you the history of the wineburger, or at least the local version. The fine elderly gentleman who claimed to be the "inventor" of the wineburger was called Harvey. He was well known and respected by the older gentry. He had a restaurant north of Camelback in the early Sixties where he introduced this sandwich. In the late Sixties, he took over the Double J on 16th Street south of Camelback. Almost immediately, Harvey was "packing 'em in." Well, Harvey is gone now, but the tradition remains. So that's it. Sincerely, Precious
The Harvey Woodrow story is a beaut. I've known for some time that it was Harvey who grabbed onto the wineburger concept and rode it into immortality. The letter-writing brigade of de facto researchers had reinforced much of my thinking on Harvey's history. But it wasn't until a couple of Harvey's old buddies called that I learned the whole story, or most of it at least. I met Ron Hall and Charlie Bryan for beers at the Harvey's del Norte, located approximately in Wyoming, specifically near the corner of Bell and Cave Creek Roads. Ron is part of the gang of guys who own the Harvey's the Wineburger King joint on 16th Street south of Camelback. This is the Harvey's that everyone knows and loves, at 4812 North 16th Street. Two more Harvey's are operating, one in Scottsdale, the other in Wyoming. The ownership picture isn't entirely clear, mostly because my notes have beer-bottle rings all over them. According to Hall, who's lived around here since before cable TV at least, Harvey ran a joint at 16th Street and Camelback for a while, but then eventually got a piece of a place he called the Bethany Inn East, sometime in the late 1950s. The location is the same as today's Raimondo's, at 6022 North 16th Street. It was a major hit, of course, and huge crowds of wineburger-wolfing folks mobbed the place every noontime. Harvey's success prompted him to expand his horizons to a storefront on 19th Avenue, which he named the Bethany Inn West. He also eventually moved his east-side operation south to the current Harvey's the Wineburger King location, which at the time was known as the Double J. By the late 1960s, Harvey was ready to get out of the business, and started selling out. The guy who bought the Bethany Inn West, John Van, still owns it. The 19th Avenue Wineburger, as it's known today, remains very true to its roots. For example, it carried Schlitz on draft until two months ago.
The Bethany Inn East ended up in the hands of Raymond LaVecchio, who currently runs one of the best neighborhood bars in the world there, with excellent food (pizza, wineburgers, etc.) and a solid clientele, many of whom would resent being referred to that way. Also, some of the guys who were first involved with buying Harvey out apparently later branched off into creating the Dirty Drummer empire. Harvey passed on six or seven years ago, say his pals. I'm abbreviating wildly here, but I think you get the picture. Harvey, it seemed to me at this point in my investigation, was definitely a key figure in the local wineburger history. Just about every current local wineburger-serving joint can trace itself back to him. I had found the tap root. Charlie Bryan used to drive Harvey to the dog track. From him I learned that Harvey was a crusty-but-sweet-hearted guy who loved to occasionally raise hell. Ron Hall remembers that Harvey used to come into the Wineburger King even after retiring. Both men seem to remember Harvey talking occasionally about the wineburger's origin. At this date, details of that tale are kind of fuzzy. No, they're very fuzzy. "I don't remember," Charlie says. "I never listened," Ron says. "Because he mumbled," Charlie says. On the wall above the bar in the Harvey's on Cave Creek is a tee shirt that carries a drawing of Harvey. We would have had a picture of it with this story, but the geniuses who control the paper's visuals opted instead to take pictures of some fat guy eating a grape sandwich. Judging from the tee shirt picture and the many warm stories related to me by his pals--I was unable and not particularly anxious to interview any of Harvey's former paramours, many of whom apparently remain around town--Harvey was an okay guy. My quest had ended. I had paddled my way to the headwaters of the wineburger river. Totally satisfied with myself and ready to take a long break from anything resembling real work, I opened the last bit of mail on my desk. Dear Cap'n Dave, I have some info you might like to know. The wineburger is the brain child of Tom Tarbox (deceased), who was a former reporter for the Arizona Republic. He had a bar and grill (with saddle seats) at Bethany Home Road and 16th Street during the 1950s. He started serving wineburgers for 25 cents. Yours truly, Wayne
Phoenix
The Phoenix wineburger was started by a newspaper writer? Get outta town! I leapt to the phone and started tracking down former colleagues of Tom Tarbox. Almost immediately I turned up Don Dedera, local ace freelancer and the last nice guy in town. As it turns out, Tarbox was one of the Republic's stars during the mid-Fifties, writing a whimsical column and the occasional human-interest feature. Before coming here he wrote for the Cleveland News, but it was as a columnist that Tarbox really made his mark.
"He would get a little something and he would worry it to death," says Dedera, who eventually followed Tarbox as the paper's lead feature columnist. "You know, it takes a genius to do that. He would notice that the big department store downtown was having a giant sale, and he would start taking off on that. `I wonder how much a giant is?' "He was laconic, almost dour. I think that was a facade. Beneath him was this little elf who could make something out of nothing. Tom could literally take nothing and make it into a delightful little essay."
In the mid-Fifties, Tarbox evidently did something to get on the bad side of Gene "The Old Man" Pulliam, the freeway-killing jughead who ran the Phoenix papers, and Tarbox was relieved of his column. It was apparently sometime around then that he opened his joint on the east side of 16th Street. "I think he had been a customer in this particular little tavern," says Dedera. "I think he took it over from the elderly guy who had founded it. I could be wrong on that. His greatest specialty was the best hamburger in town. He'd take a big ball of ground sirloin and put it on the grill. He'd cook it down and flip it, and mash it a little bit, flip it, mash it a little bit, down to a half- or three-quarters-inch thick. "On that toasted bun, with a glass of beer--it was really worth going in for."
Tarbox didn't abandon journalism after leaving the Republic. He went on to do some writing for papers in Scottsdale and Sun City, and later won national awards for his column writing. Dedera's memories of Tarbox's bar and grill are somewhat bittersweet. "When you have a column, everybody in town knows you, and you're hard-pressed to know everybody else," Dedera says. "With Tom, suddenly, boom, he was just a little tavern operator, a hamburger chef. He had the city--the state--literally in the palm of his hand.
"We're all egomaniacs. To have that abruptly cut off, to go back and be an anonymous person, where nobody flatters you anymore, nobody buys you lunch . . . "He lined the walls of his tavern with his old columns. They kind of turned yellow with the grease."
Tarbox died in the late 1970s. Tom's wife Helen still lives here. I called her, and she happily shared all kinds of great stuff about her husband, most of it taken from an unpublished book Tom wrote late in his life. Apparently, Tarbox never had an official name for his joint, according to his book. He called it "the Joint," but never put a sign out front. According to Tarbox's own words, the stools were made from iron tractor seats, this creating the saddle effect to which Wayne of Phoenix refers in his letter. The Joint also was a favorite of local jazz musicians. One of them, a piano player, was capable of playing along with the juke box. Tarbox says in his book that the guy would sit for hours and jam along with Stan Kenton on the box. As Helen read this section from the book, I desperately wanted to go back in time. I asked her if she knew how the wineburger craze really started. If anyone was going to know first-hand, here she was. "I was taking Gourmet magazine back in Cleveland," she says. "I had used wine at home in cooking, putting wine in the hamburgers. "That's the way we did 'em here."
I never expected the celebration of the wineburger to close this way, with a touching little tag about a humor columnist who ends up flipping burgers, but sometimes the facts jump out into the road and you've got to stand on the brakes.
Still, if anyone out there knows anything that contradicts anything I've written here, I'd appreciate it if you'd just keep it to yourself. Except for eating them, I'm through with wineburgers for a while. A few weeks ago I wanted an excuse to eat grilled meat in dark places. Now I'm on the cover of New Times with a salad on my head.
This explanation had a lot of things I like in a yarn. There was action, flames, drinking, high adventure--even a guy named Bob.
"It all started around Manhattan's 88th Street-West End Avenue area," one reader wrote. "The two principals are Maury Weinberger . . . "
I decided it was too late in the project to let the interjection of factual information sway me from my mission. I decided to ignore William's letter.
"We jokingly referred to the place as `Al's Scrounge, Home of the Slimeburger.' But, oh, once I tried one!" another reader wrote.
Things were going well, until the boss caught her uncorking the red for a snort. "What the hell is that?" he asked. "For the burgers," she said.
I immediately booked plane tickets to Davenport. Then I canceled, and made reservations to the Nobel Prize awards dinner. The 19th Avenue Wineburger, as it's known today, remains very true to its roots. For example, it still carries Schlitz on draft.
"The wineburger is the brain child of Tom Tarbox, a former reporter for the Republic." The Phoenix wineburger was started by a newspaper writer?
The Joint was a favorite of local jazz musicians. One of them, a piano player, would sit for hours and jam along with Stan Kenton on the box.