Theories abound on who first put burger to bun and introduced the ancestor of today's hamburger. Apparently, no one cares when and how the patty melt came to be, who gave birth to this love child of the grilled cheese sandwich and the burger. (Both have entries for the hamburger, and Food Lover's also includes the Reuben sandwich.) Search the Internet for the history of the patty melt, and you come up empty. It just is.īoth The Food Lover's Companion and The Food Chronology have plummeted in my estimation: neither includes a mention of the patty melt. The patty melt needs no condiments, no regional variations, no additions. A burger is the sum of its parts, not an entity unto itself, as is the patty melt. But that's the thing: a burger is defined by what else is on it - a cheeseburger, a mushroom burger, a bacon burger - or by its ostensible origin - a French burger, a Southwestern burger. Don't get me wrong I like burgers when they're well made, with good toppings. The fact is inescapable: when compared with a burger, the patty melt is superior. They were fine, really, but they weren't patty melts. The promotion came with a large enough raise to upgrade my lunch splurges on most Fridays (after too many drinks and not enough sleep most Thursday nights) my friends and I would slouch off to the grill down the street, known for its Bloody Marys and burgers. In time, I made friends at work and was promoted. The result was reliably perfect: a fresh, hot patty melt (even better, it was subsidized by my employer). It took awhile to cook I'd pull out a book and catch up on a few pages while keeping an eye on the progress - the patty grilling while the onions sizzled on the flattop, next to the rye bread that crisped while the Swiss cheese warmed and softened on top. It didn't take long for me to discover that only if you ordered a rare burger did they cook it from scratch (anything else was precooked and just finished on the grill), so although I prefer hamburgers cooked a little more, my unfailing order became a patty melt, rare.
No one in my department ate there, despite the lunchtime stream of secretaries from my floor picking up sandwiches for their bosses.Īt the grill, though, they offered a patty melt, redemption for countless cafeteria faults. The first time I ventured down there (I'd forgotten to bring a lunch or had nothing to bring), I felt a prick of shame and self-pity. In the lowest level of the BofA building was a cafeteria of the sort that I came to realize was ubiquitous in large office buildings and hospitals: subsidized, with various stations - a grill, a hot line, a sandwich station and a salad bar. But once every couple of weeks, I'd splurge and treat myself to a patty melt. My lunches were leftovers or tuna sandwiches brought from home. Like most liberal-arts-educated, underemployed ex-academicians, I made only enough money to get by. My first real job after leaving graduate school was in the Bank of America Center in downtown San Francisco.
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