Duke's Grill - Monroe, North Carolina

Last week I had cause to take a day trip to the vicinity of Charlotte, North Carolina, so I went ahead and scouted out the burger joints and found myself deeply humbled because I had never heard of a Carolina-style cheeseburger before. I don’t know how I missed it, but sure enough, I had to that point. A Carolina-style burger is dressed with slaw AND chili, mustard and onion. I like to imagine how this concoction came to be. Perhaps some poor jackass was low on cash one day and he was hungry so he thought he’d spend his last five-spot on a slaw-burger, but then the chili-burger caught his eye and he found himself in a deep internal conflict. Ultimately, he said, hell with it, put it all on one burger, and bingo, there you go.

Well, it ain’t my favorite. In theory, I adore each of these components, so of course, I ought to love this style of burger. The example I sampled came from Duke’s Grill in Monroe, North Carolina, which has all the externals one could want from a burger shack. It’s a little place, and there’s nothing fancy about it, tucked away on a corner in the older part of town. It even has a quirky rule that cell phones are banned and above every table is a sign that reads: Take Your Phone Calls Outside. I don’t think that’s the actual verbiage of the sign, and I would have taken a picture of it, but I left my phone in the car.

The burger itself is not bad. It is hot and fresh, and I could appreciate it more in theory than in fact. The chili is good and thick and meaty, which is exactly what it is supposed to be, but the slaw is super-sweet, and I think in theory the mustard is there to cut the sweet, but it wasn’t enough, and so the ultimate finish is a sweet note, and I’m not looking for that when it comes to burgers. So, all I can say about it is that the burger is too sweet.

Here’s the thing that I don’t understand at all. We ordered fries and onion rings, and both were the frozen food service variety. Again, I don’t understand this at all, and I despise crinkle-cut fries. I won’t eat them because they give me no joy.

I don’t understand why any place like this would skimp on the sides. I just don’t get it. You’ve got a good burger. You’ve got the atmosphere. You’ve got the pointlessly quirky house rule. And you serve crinkle-cuts? Why? Why not buy sacks of spuds, run them through any kind of cutter and deep-fry those puppies in peanut oil? Or don’t serve fries at all because that, to me, is preferable to any food-service crinkle cut.

So, I didn’t love this burger. I was open to loving it, but alas I didn’t. But I can tell you this, had the fries and rings been good, that would have for damn-sure mitigated things. As is, I have no reason to go back in there because they serve nothing I want to eat a second time.

Cardinal rule: Treat the sides like mains. To Hell with crinkle-cut fries.