For the next week, I’ll be writing short posts on the meals I enjoyed during a two-week vacation in my native California.

My first hour in California runs like clockwork: Get off the plane. Find a restroom. Pick up my baggage. Drive to In-N-Out.

Plenty have followed this routine for years, and plenty others have scoffed at how we Californians cling to nostalgia-infused fantasies about America’s most overrated burger. Nick Solares has best headed off that discussion, so I don’t have to justify my ritual in too much detail here.

I’ve said before that comparing In-N-Out to places like Shake Shack is an irrelevant exercise. Point-by-point comparisons of two clearly different products easily reduce to the maxim “you get what you pay for,” and on that line, In-N-Out kills the competition pound for pound in terms of pure value. Yet, if I were offered a choice of my favorite burgers for free, I would certainly leave In-N-Out’s at the bottom of the list. These are considerations of context – as long as my stomach empties at the end of the day, the entire idea of a head-to-head burger showdown (I’m looking at you, overzealous Five Guys fans) is something of an insult to the ridiculous variety of great burgers available in this country.

I like to test my dining loyalties in more extreme colors. Whenever I see the words “In-N-Out is overrated” or hear some New Yorker gushing about the latest monumental restaurant burger as the best he’s ever had, I ask myself if I would rather live day in and day out in a society that decided to eliminate In-N-Out from the face of the earth or in a world without Minetta Tavern. Which one could I eat every day if I needed to? Which one could I always come back to without having to think about things like wait time, monthly budget, and palate fatigue? Which one would save me in moments of supreme hunger, penny pinching and unreliable travel food? Which one is the clearest and most direct experience of the American hamburger? I’d vote high end burgers out of existence without a second thought.

I guess what I learn every time I touch down in California is that when it comes to burgers, I’m a fast food idealist. I want the comfort of a consistent and universal burger that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together. I want a plain toasted bun, an unremarkable hunk of iceberg lettuce, two slices of nondescript, conventional California tomato, and a thin, well-done patty that gets the job done in the simplest way possible. I want cardboard cups with freshly cut fries, I want clean-tasting milkshakes, and I want to know that the people making my food are treated right.

And I want it all for under $5.00. An In-N-Out burger is real food, real fast, real cheap, and real proof that fast food can do right by everyone – what other establishment so uncannily gets everything right at prices to move? There is no comparison, and there is no way to overrate such a perfectly realized icon of American cuisine.

Share this story. Stay hungry.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Los Angeles, Orange County.