All American meal -- Thailand X

After a near-death experience with a mountain, there’s nothing more comforting for dinner than a beefy burger. Lucky enough for Karen and me, there was Mike’s Burgers, just down the main street from our guesthouse.

Mike’s Burgers looks like an all-American little hamburger stand, with yellow vinyl stools lining the counters and servers wearing bright primary color uniforms grilling up your burgers and frying up your fries fresh and in front of your eye. Above the grill is a picture menu with combination deals and along the side walls are photos of celebrities holding burgers up to their mouths (there was even one of Governor Arnold at In-N-Out). It felt so familiar, as if I’d eaten hamburgers in Thailand my entire life.

I ordered the onion burger with onion rings, French fries, and a Fanta (orange Fanta has been my drink of choice in Thailand, although I can’t remember the last time I drank it in the US). I saw them plunk my piece of meat on the grill, my sliced onions with a squirt of oil on too, then open up a bag of frozen onion rings and a bag of French fries and dunk them in the deep fryer. Mmm…this was going to be good.

The man spread some mayonnaise on the bun, plopped the piece of meat on, piled on the onions, leaned over and put all that meaty goodness right in front of me. He poured out the fries from the deep fryer basket with oil still dripping and plunked that in front of me too. Then came the onion rings. It took no more than half a second from the food to come off the grill and in front of my face, and it was all top-of-the-mouth-searing hot. The bun was too hot to handle and the fries left me open-mouthed with steam escaping.

But once they cooled down enough, they were spectacular. The burger’s beef patty was amazingly tender, soft, and juicy. I don’t know what they did to that cow to make the meat taste so good, and I don’t know if I want to know either. That slather of mayo on that bun added a nice rich tanginess. And those onions were soft and sweet but were oozing out the sides of my buns so I had to eat them with my fingers. The fries were fat and crisp with flakey potato inside. But the highlight of the meal was the onion rings. They weren’t dinky little onion rings but massive ones. The batter was crunchy and well seasoned. The onions inside were well cooked as to leave no hints of pungent raw onion and allowed you to bite through them, rather than bit into them and then pull all the onion away from the batter shell. I traveled across an entire ocean to find the best onion rings I’d ever eaten in Thailand.

I was stuffed, my hands were covered in grease and ketchup, and I was so satisfied. When our lady server asked how our meal was, I rubbed my tummy and practiced my Thai, “Aroy.” Delicious. Karen told her that those burgers were better than the ones she’s had in New York. Maybe we’d have dinner there again the next night.