Bypass Burger

Miss Mary Teresa Sterling tapped her long fingernail on the menu, “And give me a margarita with that, too.”

It was the waitress’s first day at the Heart Attack Grill, her third in Las Vegas, and her head was hurting so badly under the harsh lighting she couldn’t remember if she had taken any aspirin or not. “I’m sorry, I want to be sure I have your order correct. Could you repeat what you said, please?”
“What’s your name?”

Still thinking about Manny saying she was too slow to be a waitress, that it was her looks keeping her in the game, she hardly heard the woman. Had she been asked something? She opened her mouth to speak and finally said, “I’m……Uh, let me just try and repeat back to you what I got down. You want the Double Bypass Burger with fries, extra mayonnaise…Is that right?”

The woman stared at the girl, flicked her eyes to the menu and tapped again on the photograph of the burger. Then she leaned forward a few inches running her eyes up and down the waitress’s uniform and seeing what appeared to be a nurse from Victoria’s Secret. “Yes, that’s right…Heidi,” reading the name off the girl’s name tag. “And don’t forget the margarita.” She pulled out a cigarette and tapping the filter against a lighter, called out to the retreating waitress, “Bring the drink first.”

Enjoying a deep pull on her cigarette and picking a fleck of imaginary tobacco from her lip, she looked out at the slots lined up in the lobby, her mind on work like always. She was a big, full-figured woman with dainty hands and beautiful features, hair a rich and lustrous shade of chestnut. Between thoughts of how she was going to make next month’s rent she noticed that the slots looked odd, like something you would see in a hospital room, heart monitors with pull down handles. She reached for the ashtray, not surprised it was a miniature bedpan in pink ceramic. Another time she might have been disgusted with the restaurant’s emergency room decor, but for now she just wanted her drink and a chance to work out the possibility of a bank loan. That was about the only thing that would give her the operating capital she needed to keep the doors open at her agency. She had four girls working in shows now and that brought in just about enough to put gas in her rusted out Coupe de Ville. A year ago she had girls in every show on the strip. Looking at the couple leaning toward each other at a nearby table clinking their glasses in a toast, she began to wonder if the waitress had forgotten her drink. After all, she had trouble taking the order. She turned her head and the waitress was standing there with a margarita in a pint-sized martini glass.

“Thanks. Listen, honey,” the woman said, deciding to have a little fun. “I know you’re busy but do you happen to know if this is an authentic margarita?”

“Huh?…Yeah, I think so.” Heidi had no idea what the lady was talking about but threw in as an afterthought, “The bartender looks like he might be from Mexico.”

“Oh, well if he’s from Mexico it must be authentic, right.”
“I guess.”

After delivering the woman’s drink, Heidi’s phone vibrated in her pocket. Turning toward the kitchen she tried to get straight in her head the orders she had in, all of it swirling in confusion along with whatever authentic margaritas were. Two steps inside the door and Manny was yelling at her. “Hey, you! You going to leave this food up here all day? Get it together. Take this milkshake out to fourteen and the Quadruple to twelve. Come back and I'll have that Double ready for you.” 

She grabbed the milkshake in one hand, the burger in the other and started back to the dining room, but staggered by the weight of the hamburger platter, she quickly put it down again. Stacked with two pounds of beef, eight slices of cheese, a whole sliced tomato and one sliced onion, all surrounded by a half-pound of French fries, the Quadruple was hell to carry. This one was the Bacon Quad that included eight slices of bacon. She cradled the platter in one arm, picked up the milkshake again and reeled away to table fourteen.

Back in the kitchen, the phone vibrating once more in her pocket, Heidi made a move at detouring to the ladies room but Manny caught her, ordering her to take a side of mayo to a man at the bar. “And here’s the Double for the woman at thirteen.”

She got to the woman’s table with the Double but something didn’t look right about the woman. “I’ve got your burger. Is everything okay? Do you need anything else?” 

The woman sat with her chin in her palm, a cigarette clamped between two extended fingers, the other hand drumming nails on the tabletop. Her face was blotched and her voice dry. “No, I’m good.” She was staring again and before Heidi could turn away she said, “I think you’re wasting your time in this place. You ever think about doing something else?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Hey, I’m not coming on to you. I have an agency. I place girls in shows, you know, in the hotels and casinos…showgirls.” She looked down at the hamburger and fries. “You think about it. Think about it and if you’re interested I’ll give you my card.”

Finally able to steal a moment and head for the bathroom, Heidi telephoned Buddy and was astounded to hear that he had decided to leave town. “You drag me all the way across the country from Georgia to this desert town and three days later tell me you’ve had enough, you’re leaving? You don’t even have to say it, Buddy. What damn plan you got brewing in that hard head of yours this time?” Someone flushed the toilet in the next stall and the door banged open. “Hold on. I can’t hear you.” A second later someone banged on the stall door.

“Heidi, Manny’s looking for you. He’s pissed as usual. Better get out here.”

“Thanks, Rita. I gotta go, Buddy. I’ll call you later.”

She delivered another six pounds of food, wrote a check for one table, signed a free pass for another customer, bonus for weighing over 350 pounds, and was back in the kitchen to pick up four butter-fat milkshakes when Manny called her. Heidi found him at the bar and he whispered, “What’s with the lady on thirteen?”

“Who?”

“The fat lady sitting in front of the window. What’s wrong with her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Go over there and see if she’s okay,” the manager told her, worried because of an incident last month when a customer suffered a heart attack while being wheeled to his car after eating a Quadruple Bypass Burger. Yeah, the burgers were advertised as big enough to cause heart attacks but that happening on the premises didn’t help business.

“Ma’am, are you okay?” It was a stupid question considering that the woman was clutching her breast and gasping for breath. Her face was a sheen of oily sweat and Heidi could see a large pulsing vein in her throat. “Can I get you something? Should I bring some water?"

The platter in front of her was empty of all but a few uneaten fries, a cigarette smoldered in the mini-bedpan and a crumpled business card lay beside the empty margarita glass. The woman forced her eyes up and motioned to her business card. “Call me, honey. I can take you outta this deathtrap” she said, as her eyes flew wide and she slid to the floor between table and chair.

Watching from the bar, Manny covered his face with both hands, then picked up the telephone to call 911.

Before bending down to help the woman, just in case she was going to be okay, Heidi reached over and slipped the business card in her pocket.

The Breakers

Before coming to live at the beach in Florida, my visits here were frequent. For a long time I’ve felt like I have a good handle on this small town and what it has to offer. But until yesterday I was ignorant of what that pink restaurant on the beach, at the end of Flagler Avenue was all about. It’s a well-known restaurant and bar three miles north, straight up the beach from me, and it’s called The Breakers. The name clearly comes from the fact that the windows all look out onto the Atlantic surf breaking on the white sand beach, and from almost anywhere inside the ocean views are endlessly postcard pretty. But all this is new to me, because until yesterday I had never been to The Breakers and was unfamiliar with all but the name and location. Somehow, in my eleven or twelve years of coming here, I had never eaten there.

For that reason, yesterday became a landmark day for me personally when a friend took me to lunch there. Stories from a handful of people had always included mention of the great burgers served at The Breakers. I have my own favorites and so never gave much thought to trying a Breakers burger. After yesterday, I realize my former attitude of little interest was my loss. No doubt about it, any of the burgers on the Breakers menu can stand up against any burger, anywhere. They are that good.

Eating in a large crowd of people is something you have to expect. Lunch or dinner at The Breakers on a day when the weather is good (and it very rarely isn’t) the restaurant will be wall to wall with people, many of whom want to pass the afternoon or evening at one of the window counters looking out at the ocean, sipping a beer, eating a burger. My friend and I were lucky and stumbled upon a couple of seats at the bar just as we arrived; perfect seats, perfect view.

Ask some locals and they will tell you that The Breakers has been here forever, but forever turns out to be no more than twenty years. A Boston family took over the beachfront property and built the restaurant in 1990. But it didn’t take them long to gain notice—apart from the reputation of that premier view of the ocean. The restaurant won a Star of the South Beach - Best Burger award for the first time in 1993. They went on to win the award in ’94, ’95, ’96, 2004, ’06, ’07, ’08 and 2009. The Breakers Burger won the Best Burger in Central Florida award in 1995, ’99, 2000 and 2005. No foolin’, this is a burger not to miss!

A full menu is offered, including dinners, all priced at $14.95, though the choices are limited to seafood. Apart from burgers, sandwiches come in the familiar varieties of chicken breast, BLT, tuna salad, chicken salad, turkey and fish. If a burger is on your mind, you will have to choose from a list of seventeen. I had the Bacon Burger and wish I had another one in front of me now. All burgers are hand-shaped with a half pound of lean ground beef, char-grilled to order, and served with lettuce, tomato & onion, and a choice of fries, potato salad or cole slaw. All are priced at $9.50. The bar offers twenty different beers on tap, and thirty brands bottled.

If you ever find yourself anywhere remotely near New Smyrna Beach, it’s worth going out of your way to spend an hour or so at The Breakers with a great burger and a dazzling view of the deep blue simple.

Hangin’ Out at the Mall

Driving west on I-4 for a little over an hour takes me to a giant shopping mall called Mall of the Millennia. Like most malls, this one too has what seems like a hundred stores on two levels, including three department stores (Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Neiman-Marcus), an Apple Store, Montblanc, the best of all hamburger restaurants, valet parking, and a million people. Visitors from Japan love this kind of thing, so we made a day of it this Monday.

Kumiko and Ikuko arrived at the mall with stars in their eyes, comfortable walking shoes on their feet and a stack of credit cards in hand. One minute inside the main entrance and there was a gasp on either side of me as the Ann Taylor store came into view. I didn’t need words to understand that it was time for me to leave them to it, while I went off to Apple and Montblanc. We agreed to meet later for lunch at Johnny Rockets.

The Apple Store at Millennia is design-wise nothing special, little more than a big rectangle with hardware on tables, and software, along with accessories on racks along the back half of the store; Genius Bar at the far end. It’s nowhere near as cool as the Manhattan glass cube store, or either of the two Tokyo stores, one of which features a glass spiral staircase leading to the upper floors, and the Ginza store which occupies its own multi-storied building. On visits to an Apple Store anywhere chances are you will find it crowded, but now with release of the iPad and the iPhone 4, you almost have to wait in line to get inside. To meet the surge of curious browser-buyers, Apple has increased the number of store personnel greatly. There were at least thirty blue-shirted employees in the Millennia store today, but unlike earlier days, not all of them are Mac professionals. They are all friendly and quick to help, but I talked at length with four of them today, and two impressed me as still learning the Mac architecture. No complaint intended. Mac professional or not, they are still good sales people and managed to separate me from almost $200.

Entering the Montblanc store, I crossed over the gates of heaven. It is the ONLY place within a hundred miles or more where I can handle and sample fountain pens and ink, and you can be certain I did that today. First on my mind was ink, and I had a deep down hope that the Millennia store would somehow have an unsold bottle of either Racing Green or Turquoise. But I got a quick no on that request. Still, there were unfamiliar colors for me to sample. Surprising to see that the bottles, boxes and color names are different from what you find in Japan. For example, what in Japan is called Deep Violet is called Lavender Violet here. The bottle in Japan holds 50ml, while the bottles I sampled today hold 60ml. The familiar rounded end opposite the cap is not rounded but square. It looks more old-fashioned, and that I like.

After playing around with half a dozen fountain pens and several colors of ink, I settled on an elegant, aristocratic-looking gray ink named Oyster Grey, and a twin to Montblanc’s Sepia, here called Toffee Brown. For reasons I haven’t figured out, the company is using different ink names here and in Japan. Samples of the Oyster Grey and Toffee Brown will be upcoming in a later post.

Johnny Rockets retro 50s hamburger restaurants are located in sixteen or seventeen countries, and thirty-one states in the US. For a long time it has been my favorite place for hamburgers, and since it is not in Japan, I wanted to introduce rocket burgers to my guests. The whole experience is a throwback to the kind of hamburger shops that were popular in the 1950s, and the burgers, though now offered in combinations wider than the lettuce, tomato & pickle hamburgers of long ago, have that great flavor I remember from high school, nights at Hoppers and curb service. Strange as it seems, we had a waiter today who grew up in Japan, so amidst all that 1950s Americana we ordered our lunch in Japanese.

After lunch we separated again and when next we came together I could hardly find the two ladies behind all the shopping bags. And so, with the trunk filled, we joined the late afternoon traffic on I-4 heading east.