Review: A quest for the best hamburgers in Kansas City

The Germans may have invented the hamburger, but Americans have perfected it.

We slap them on the grill to celebrate our nation’s birthday. We stack them on platters to share with friends and family on Memorial Day and Labor Day picnics. Shoot, entire industries have been built around fast-food burger drive-throughs that feed our families, day in and day out.

Could our culture, our very lifestyle, survive without the burger? I think not. Thumbing my nose — albeit temporarily — at cholesterol numbers, I set out on a quest for the best burgers in Kansas City. I was seeking places old and new, high-brow and dumpy. I focused on bacon double cheeseburgers and fries or tots. I washed them down with chocolate malts with extra malt powder. Generally I got the works: lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, mayonnaise and ketchup. It seemed the LTOPMK was de rigueur. I don’t do mustard.

By day, I feasted on burgers. By night, I dined on bowls of low-fat, high-fiber cereal. And though it was a grand time, I’m thinking my next bacon double cheeseburger will be far, far, far in the future.

In no particular order, here are some places that have put the lowly patty on a pedestal.

•GrandStand Burgers: 4942 Merriam Drive, Overland Park, 913-362-0111. Hours: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Plopped in the middle of an asphalt slab parking lot, sort of like Dorothy’s house after the tornado, GrandStand Burgers promises “Best Burgers.” In a meat-obsessed town, that’s a mighty promise.

I step out of the car and suck up a big gulp of air. It smells just like my house did when I was a kid and my mom was frying up hamburgers. We raised our own beef; the GrandStand beef smelled just as steely and fresh.

At Nick Marchi’s burger joint, God and Dale Earnhardt Jr. get almost as much play as his fabulous burgers. Marchi was in Christian broadcasting for 20 years, and he’s a huge NASCAR fan.

Six years ago he took over the beloved burger joint, which had been some sort of burger and ice cream parlor since the early 1960s. Inside, the space is as tight as a galley kitchen on a jumbo airliner. The three people working behind the counter weave around each other in a well-choreographed, well-greased dance.

Marchi takes the orders and blends the made-from-scratch chocolate malt. His brother-in-law Marc Hurley is the grill guy, turning tennis ball-sized wads of beef into half-inch-thick patties, reheating foot-long slices of Scavuzzo’s bacon and griddling buns until the edges get all crispy and crunchy. Kevin Stoker is the condiment master and the one who hands the final product to salivating diners.

The lowdown: There are only four stools in the place but several picnic tables outside. The tots are served spectacularly hot and crunchy. Each patty is one-third of a pound. Their most popular burger is the Kelly Burger: a double cheeseburger with a slice of ham and two strips of bacon.

Marchi also says they do a great tenderloin. If his tenderloin is as good as his burger, I’ll take this man of God at his word.

•Hayes Hamburgers: 2502 N.E. Vivion Road, 816-453-5575. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For 53 years folks have been straddling the stools and hunching over the diner counter at Hayes, a 22-seat diner at the intersection of Vivion and Antioch roads in the Northland. The itty-bitty diner does breakfast, burgers and chili, pies and biscuits and honest shakes and malts.

They griddle thin, almost lacy burgers here and slide them onto buns that have their insides toasted on the griddle. I pop in on a Saturday night. The guy behind the counter, his hair in a ponytail, sporting a Pink Floyd T-shirt, takes my order, then twirls around, his head nearly brushing the ceiling, to make my shake.

I get why his forearms are roped with muscle. He scoops vanilla ice cream from a jumbo-sized plastic bucket to make my malt. He adds a few glugs of milk, spoons in malt powder, squeezes in chocolate syrup and jams the metallic container under the malt machine. It churns for several minutes while the grill cook tends to the sizzling patties.

I abandon protocol and order the chili version. The chili is a finely crumbled chili — no beans, no real spice but a whole lot of messy goodness. I probably needed a fork; instead, I used my bun to mop up the loose bits. It’s a family recipe that dates to 1906.

Fries and onion rings are the frozen kind but still crunchily addictive.

And, as it should be with any old-school, 24-hour-a-day place, Hayes attracts some characters. Like the skinny chick, her eyes shrouded behind sunglasses, her Frye boot knockoffs looped over the stool. Or the solitary gray-haired fellow who shuffled in for a sandwich and cup of coffee. Or the two 20-somethings who enthusiastically inhaled their doubles without saying more than a dozen words between them.

•Westport Flea Market: 817 Westport Road, 816-931-1986. Hours: 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily.

It’s cash-only at the Westport Flea Market, a labyrinthine place on the western end of Westport.

The Flea Market has a storied history: Infamous serial killer Bob Berdella had a booth in the flea market part of the building. The place nearly closed a few years ago, until Joe Zwillenberg stepped in to buy it, rescuing it from developers who wanted to demolish the building and build a Hooters.

Hooters? The neighbors revolted. The Flea Market survived.

And you’re likely to share the place with a local politicos and other celebs. I saw former mayor Richard Berkley grabbing a burger with some of his compatriots. Mayor Mark Funkhouser had his election victory party at the Flea Market.

Drinks are delivered by a waitress; burgers are ordered at the bar counter. You pay each tab separately. Food is picked up at a pass-through window by one of the cooks. The guy who grills my patty fancies himself a comedian, singing, yodeling and making goofy rhythms with customer’s names.

I order the 10-ounce Flea Market burger with cheddar. The Flea Market, which just celebrated its 27th year anniversary, gets its meat from McGonigle’s. And yeah, you can taste the quality.

Those with petite appetites can get the Mini Market version, a 5  1/2 -ounce version of the signature burger. And the Patty Melt is a lovely variation on the cheeseburger theme: the same Mini Market burger is served on lightly toasted rye with Swiss cheese and grilled onions.

Even in the midst of a hamburger glut, a bite or two of the Patty Melt got me over the hump. Good ol’ Patty cleansed the palate, cleared my burger brain and I was ready to sample more burgers from other joints around town.

The mostly self-serve concept extends to the condiments table, where you can ratchet up the flavor quotient with shredded lettuce, onions, pickles, tomatoes and a few other goodies. Go crazy with the mustard. Pile on the raw onions. Nobody cares if you pig out. No one is keeping score.

All the sandwiches come with a choice of curly fries as springy as a piggy tail, cottage cheese or coleslaw.

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.

There’s no way, really, to tackle this one. And several minutes pass before I muster up the courage to pick it up. Another spell of time ticks by before I take the first bite. The sandwich was thicker than my mouth is wide. I may not get something of everything, but what I do manage, bite by bite, is divine.

The malt, made with soft-serve ice cream and chocolate syrup, is suck-your-brains-out thick and crunchy with bits of malt powder. I like the texture. And it’s not so sweet that you get a sugar high.

And for those of you who avoided Jerry’s because of the cigarette smoke: Jerry’s is now smoke-free.

•ChefBurger: 1350 Walnut St., 816-842-2747. Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily

Rob Dalzell, in the midst of creating a Crossroads restaurant empire, opened ChefBurger in the Power & Light District. He gets kudos for being one of the few independent owners to open there. And word has it that he has been so flipping busy that he hasn’t been able to institute the build-your-own burger policy.

So for now, customers pick and choose from a set menu. This being Kansas City, I ordered the Kansas City Barbecue Bacon Blue burger. There was all that and more: a fat, crunchy onion ring squatted in the middle of the patty, surrounded by bacon, barbecue sauce and blue cheese.

My lunch buddy ordered one of the alt-burgers, the ahi tuna one served with a crunchy slaw. It reminded me of the seared ahi tuna burger served at a vintage burger joint in Napa Valley.

We shared an order of the garlic parsley waffle fries. Although the waffled potatoes are frozen, not fresh, they were decent — a little soft and chewy, perhaps from the garlicky, brilliant green sauce ladled over them.

If you’re feeling wicked and are over 21, order one of Dalzell’s spiked milkshakes. They add liquors to the ice cream.

Unlike most of the other joints I patronized, ChefBurger is austere and modern. And with all those hard surfaces — concrete floors, high ceilings and three walls of windows, the place can get a bit noisy.

•Michael Smith: 1900 Main St., 816-842-2202. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, dinner 5 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

It takes a lotta chutzpah to put your name on a hunk of meat.

Chef Michael Smith did just that, grinding up beef tenderloin, baking up housemade buns, making homemade port ketchup and calling his signature burger the Smithburger.

It is a very good burger: appropriately juicy, decadently thick, served smoldering hot off the grill, the cheddar cheese melting onto the slab of medium-rare beef, tomato, lettuce, bacon and red onion circles.

His burger comes with pommes frites, skinny fries, if you will. Although made from scratch from peel-on potatoes, they were too limp and greasy the day I sampled them.

But the burger was so good, I’d give the fries a pass and try them on another visit. And although I liked the ketchup — appreciated the sweet, cinnamony spicy notes in it — I guess I’m a Philistine when it comes to ketchup on my burger. Just pass the Hunt’s, thank you very much.

Since I was in a fancy place, I paired my burger with a rich and chewy glass of red wine — the Slipstream Shiraz/Grenache from Australia.

And for dessert, two of us shared the upscale version of a banana split: caramelized banana slices served over two baby scoops of housemade banana and chocolate ice creams drizzled with chocolate sauce and paired with a wee slice of banana mousse layer cake.