Review: A quest for the best hamburgers in Kansas City

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A couple of other insider tidbits: The Flea Market has daily specials, about 50 bottles on tap or in bottles and right now, the Flea Market is nonsmoking until 9 p.m.

•LC Hamburgers Etc: 7612 N.W. Prairie View Road, 816-741-6027. Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Mark Potts knows his beef. Even more, he knows better than to mess with one of the best burgers around.

Potts began working for the burger place in 1985 when he turned 15. He kept in touch with LC, the owner who treated his young employees like family and taught them the value of doing a job right, even if you were just flipping burgers. When LC was ready to retire in 1998, he called Potts.

The building, sans the lobby, was built in the late 1960s as the Platte Woods Snack Stop. In 1973 it became LC’s. Not much has changed. It seats 20. It’s closed on Sundays.

And like his mentor, Potts uses only the finest ingredients. The meat is ground chuck from L&C Meat in Independence. And everything is cooked to order. They even grill the buns the old-fashioned way, putting a board on top to weigh them down to get that extra bit of toast and crunch. But they never, ever smash down the patties.

“You wanna keep the juices,” Potts says.

I shared the lobby with a character wearing Harry Potter glasses and driving a vintage, low-rider jalopy cobbled from a salvaged Model A. He was telling a good story to another burger-eater, but when my food arrived, I became distracted.

As my burger cooled, I dived into my tots. They were a revelation: the outsides were as light as tempura, well-seasoned and nearly greaseless. They set a new tot standard.

“Nothing ever sits around,” Pott says. “When you get the tots, they’ve come straight out of the fryer. Just like the burgers.”

And the burger? It was an exquisite amalgam of rustic beef, crunchy onion, juicy tomato, smoky bacon, gooey cheese all on a mayo-slathered crisped bun.

Juices dribbled down my hand in a continuous rivulet into the Styrofoam box. After a while, I quit worrying about the messy heap of napkins piling up on the table and how many calories I was consuming and gave in to the pleasure of the patty.

•LC Hamburgers Etc.: 7108 N. Oak Trafficway, Gladstone. 816-468-0044. Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.

Three years ago, Potts opened a second LC’s in a former burger joint space on North Oak. He had to teach his co-owner Brandon Doherty a thing or two about the burger business. Doherty had a fast-food background and figured he’d do things the way the chains did.

But when business dropped, Doherty changed his ways. And sales began to rise again.

“Our customers know their food won’t come out in 30 seconds,” Potts says. “We don’t cook a hundred an hour or two in advance and keep them in a warmer.”

They use same the meat, the same frying and grilling techniques as they do at the original.

The only difference: They do only drive-up, and they’re open on Sundays.

•Jerry’s Original Woodswether Café: 1414 W. Ninth St., 816-472-6333. Hours: 5:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday

A few feet down the counter, I hear a waitress ask, incredulously: “You got the double?”

She’s sounds as stunned as I felt when one of Jerry Naster’s burger beauties was placed in front of me. Nearly 1 pound of meat, which Naster gets from B&B Meat Company in North Kansas City, dwarfs the bun. In between the patties and the bread is the garden: lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle. Beside the mountainous sandwich lies a nest of french fries large enough to house several baby birds.

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