Madame - Uneeda Burger, Seattle, Washington

I was very impressed with Uneeda Burger!  It is the type of place you would want in your town; clean, funky but not cluttered, great food, high quality local ingredients, friendly staff and a big deck outside.  All of their burgers are made with all natural Painted Hills beef or you can sub out The Gleason Ranch 100% Pasture Raised Beef for $2.00.  Check out their menu!  You know its going to be VERY good when they are using ingredients like porcini, gruyere, black truffle salt, manchego, and roasted chili relish.

Madame - Uneeda Burger

I ordered the Madame = delicious!  It is a perfect, gourmet-style burger! With a sunny-side egg, Black Forest ham, Gruyere, Dijon-mayo & truffled shoestring potatoes.  At $9.50, this is an incredible deal considering the ingredients and the thought put into creating the flavor combinations. VERY good and all the flavors complemented each other amazingly well.  Uneeda Burger is not a sloppy burger joint.  Chef (yes a chef at a burger joint!) Scott Staples has put together an exquisite dining experience that is simple, yet complex.  And it is still just a burger joint!

The "Bucky" Burger at the Ely Steakhouse in Ely, Minnesota

Friends kept telling me about the famous "Bucky" Burger in a restaurant in Ely, MN.  I travel there occasionally for work but rarely have time to travel into town to sample the local cuisine, like Walleye, steaks and burgers .  I recently spent over 2 weeks in Northern MN and had the opportunity to eat in Ely!

The “Bucky” Burger at the Ely Steakhouse is 8 oz. ground beef with bacon, cheddar, grilled onion & special sauce served on a char-grilled bun.  It was quite good and really a "down home", no frills, bacon cheeseburger burger.  It is pretty reasonably priced at $10.42 and comes with steakhouse fries.  My only developmental feedback for the "Bucky" Burger is that it is so juicy that the bottom bun was drenched.  Maybe this is just the style of the burger or perhaps it was user error in that I usually admire burgers that are new to me and take pictures of it so that I can share them with you, my readers, thus allowing the bottom bun to get soggy.  My remedy for this burger dilemma is to put a layer of lettuce between the meat and the BOTTOM bun.

The next time you are in Ely, I would highly recommend that you stop into the Ely Steakhouse and get a "Bucky" Burger.  I tried to find out the origin of the name "Bucky".  The research that I found shows that a "Bucky" burger is a specific type of burger and may have originated in La Crosse, Wisconsin at a place called Bucky's Burger Barn.  I even found a site that has a video and ingredient list for how to make a "Bucky" Burger.  

Sully and Tyler eye their "Bucky" Burgers

The name comes from the fugitive Ralph "Bucky" Phillips, who spent much of his life on the run. During the earlier phases of the hunt, Phillips acquired somewhat of a folk hero status, with local businesses selling t-shirts saying "Where's Bucky?", "Run, Bucky, Run!", "Don't Shoot, Not Bucky", or "Got Bucky?" (a parody of Got Milk?), a local restaurant selling a "Bucky Burger" (because it was served in a 'to-go' box for those on the run), and a local folk musician, Noah Gokey, releasing a single entitled "Run Bucky Run!".

Killer Burger - The "Barnyard"

I had a friend tell me that his favorite burger joint in Portland was Killer Burger.  I had never heard of it before but put it on my list of places to seek out!  On a recent trip to Hood River I was searching the internet for a good place to get a burger and I found a Killer Burger just across the Columbia River in Bingen, WA.

The menu is quite unique and I really want to go back to try the Peanut-Butter-Pickle-Bacon burger which sounds really good.  Check out the menu!  At the top it says Every burger comes with Bacon.  Now this is my kind of burger joint.

However, if you know me the choice was simple...I was ordering the BARNYARD!  Ham, Egg, Bacon, Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato, Smokey House Sauce, Grilled Onion, & Pickle.  This is an impressive burger for a reasonable price of $10.95.  The ham was as thick as the burger patty and it was really good.  WOW!  I think I might need to adjust my TOP 5 after eating this beauty!

I think I will be going back to Killer Burger the next time I travel to Portland!

The BARNYARD at Killer Burger