As a former restaurant critic and frequent Yelp reviewer, and as someone with a very good memory, I have been thinking recently that I am yet to stumble upon the perfect hamburger. I have eaten some very good ones and I have some that I consider my favorites, but there isn’t one that I’ve eaten and exclaimed “Wowie, this is everything I could have asked for from ground-up cow meat!”
In fact, I have exclaimed many times that I still have never eaten a burger in a restaurant that was better than one I could make myself. To this day, I maintain the best burger I ever ate was one I made myself back in college–seasoned to perfection and cooked just right. I remember thinking to myself as I ate it how good it was. And that is a feeling that I have not rediscovered since that day.
The closest a restaurant has ever come to perfection is Town Hall Brewery in Minneapolis near the University. The Seven Corners Burger is doused with their house BBQ sauce.
Here’s my list of favorites that I can easily recall:
- Town Hall Brewery – Minneapolis, MN
- Blue Door Pub – St. Paul, MN
- Green Mill – Minneapolis, MN
- The Hideout – Austin, TX
- Hopdoddy – Austin, TX
- Matt’s – Minneapolis, MN
But why would I like a burger from a restaurant better than one that I made myself that I know came directly from the Glanzer family farm! Along with proximity to a trusted mechanic, that’s another thing we miss about being in Texas–no more stocking up on a freezer full of beef from the Glanzers! Maybe they can ship some to us on dry ice.
Ryan Glanzer Blog 
You got that right…there’s nothing that compares to eating beef that comes off the old farmstead. We just got 1/2 beef butchered, and it’s chilling in the freezer. All you need to do is stop by and we’ll load you up! As for delicious burgers, I heard that there’s a guy who stopped in at the Carpenter cafe many years ago and got quite the burger, served by two young boys. It may have been a tad undercooked with brown lettuce on it, but otherwise, YUM!