Recipe: Astoria Cocktail
A Walk Down Burger Memory Lane, with cocktails.
So far, Hamburger America’s regional burger series has been a walk down memory lane for me.
At the same time food historian George Motz opened his living museum to the American hamburger in the SoHo section of Manhattan last November, he announced that the neo-retro diner would, from time to time, play host to several regional burger styles. At first I thought this meant that Motz was just going to make his own versions of those regional styles. But, no. He meant he was going to make the actual item, using the true recipe, and bring in the owners of the burger joints from which those sandwiches originated.
The first entry came last month. It was the Butter Burger from Solly’s Grille in my hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This was a bit of serendipity, since I paid my first call to Solly’s just in January of 2023, a visit I documented on The Mix.
Second up in the series—and debuting just yesterday—was the Olive Burger from the Weston’s Kewpee Sandwich Shop in Lansing, Michigan. Now, I have never had an Olive Burger (more on what that is in a second), but, oh, do I know Kewpee. It has been a peculiar obsession of mine for nearly two decades.