Baylor University English professor Kevin Gardner has a gripe with Texas Monthly’s recent best burgers issue.

Food critics “covered more than 12,000 miles and ate at more than 250 restaurants” for the August article, but in a letter featured in this month’s issue, an exasperated Gardner took the magazine to task for leaving Waco’s patties off its top 50 list.

Though Health Camp on Waco’s traffic circle was mentioned as an aside — it’s one of Miss Texas 2008 Rebecca Robinson’s favorites — no local burger was recognized as one of the 50 best, which Gardner said partly comes down to a definitional problem.

Kevin Gardner, enjoying a double cheeseburger from Tom's Burgers, says he feels Waco was snubbed by Texas Monthly's food critics. (Jerry Larson photo)

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“I couldn’t believe the list,” he said. “I felt like they had privileged the wrong kind of hamburger and the wrong kind of hamburger place,” he said in between bites of a double cheeseburger at Tom’s Burgers on Sanger Avenue.

Austin-based Texas Monthly food editor Patricia Sharpe said Gardner was far from the only reader disappointed that a favorite patty didn’t make the cut. The magazine published almost a full page of comments from readers who took issue with the list.

Gardner’s complaint was not merely parochial, however. He said the magazine snubbed a specific class of burgers — the kind he loves.

“I have a certain food memory of hamburgers being a certain way, like at a local drive-in sort of place: The patties were always thin, crispy on the edges, the buns were always lightly toasted right on the griddle,” he said, explaining his burger sensibility.

“You get away from that when you start getting your hamburgers in big restaurants (where) you get massive burgers that are thick and dense and almost tough to chew at times, or people get really creative and want to have a gazillion toppings.”

“I didn’t realize I was such a purist or snob until I read that Texas Monthly article, and I reacted so strongly,” Gardner said. “I was angry at the slighting of the hamburger and the slighting of Waco.”

As he put it in his letter to the editor, “This traditionally prepared food, so marvelous yet simple, can only be found in a few places, and you missed them all.”

Not all Wacoans agreed that the burger list was too froufrou. Anne Rue — who, along with her husband, Nelson, runs Schmaltz’s Sandwich Shop and Nelson’s Banquet Hall — is out to try all 50 burgers.

While waiting to fly out to her youngest child’s graduation from Texas Tech University, Rue grabbed the burger issue. She noticed a burger near Fredericksburg, where relatives run a bed and breakfast. She flipped the page and saw a mouth-watering burger served at Orlando’s in Lubbock, where her son had worked during college.

“By the time I got to Lubbock, I decided I had a new mission,” Rue said.

She said she and her husband have been to four of the burger places, using their own scoring system, keeping their receipts and having someone from each restaurant sign their page of the Texas Monthly issue.

Rue was quick to point out that as much fun as she was having going through the list, the magazine made a glaring omission when it left out Waco’s Dubl-R Old Fashioned Hamburgers on Herring Avenue.

“For our rating system, we’re doing one to five, and we’re basing that on our Dubl-R burger, which is a five.”

Rue said she wished Texas Monthly would review more restaurants in the area.

“I wish they would come here because I would be upset if they did a sandwich issue and didn’t try Schmaltz’s.”

Rue is not the only member of the restaurant community who feels the region has been overlooked by food critics.

Davin Hightower, co-owner of the Green Room Grille on Austin Avenue, said with eateries in other regions regularly written up in the magazine’s review section, “it’s hard for the little restaurants in Waco to stand up and be noticed.”

When presented with the claim that Texas Monthly has neglected Waco, food editor Patricia Sharpe conceded the point.

“We probably don’t get to Waco as much as it deserves to be gotten to,” Sharpe said.

She attributed the lack of Waco reviews to the fact that Texas Monthly’s 20 or so critics live in other parts of the state.

The reviewers are mostly based in bigger cities, she said, with a few exceptions including a food critic living in tiny Terlingua, near Big Bend National Park.

Biting into his double cheeseburger — two patties, draped in American cheese with shredded lettuce, chopped onions and pickles strategically placed on the bottom and yellow mustard on top — Gardner was nevertheless able to put aside his beef and enjoy the simple pleasure of his meal.

“It just makes me feel really good to see someone doing it the way it was always done,” he said. “No frills, but you don’t need frills with a hamburger.”

mshapiro@wacotrib.com

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