White Castle Hamburgers: Shit or Crap?

Nostalgia is a fickle mistress. Well, not really, but it's kinda funny. Nostalgia is the saving grace of many awful, awful things. Such as:

• Baseball played at any level
• 80's rock bands
• Bell bottoms
• Visiting your old high school
  
• Stupid ex-girlfriends
• Adults at Disneyland
• Rick Reilly sports columns

I think there's a couple more that I'm leaving out. Nostalgia makes the ordinary, mundane, or awful...extraordinary, non-mundane, and non-awful.

Chefs have come to this realization fairly recently, and the phenomenon has spread rapidly. Probably due to the playful nature of the dishes at the French Laundry, where Thomas Keller has been putting sophisticated spins on dishes such as macaroni and cheese, coffee and donuts, and the cherished ice cream cone.

Now you know what I'm talking about. You can't swing a dead midget without having his or her corpse slam into some upscale steakhouse serving some twist on macaroni and cheese. Or grilled cheese and tomato soup. Or Kripsy Kreme, which just sounds nostalgic. Or s'mores. Or sliders. Sliders are everywhere.

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Which slams us right into White Castle. White Castle is in almost every sense, charming. The "architecture" of their establishments, their thinly-veiled targeting of inbreds, their tiny little boxes, the way they make their staff dress like jackasses. It's like Johnny Rocket's for mouthbreathers. So these guys have HUGE nostalgia potential. And they better ride that nostalgia wave till it breaks, cause their food is absolute dogshit. They steam their hamburgers! And they're not even smart enough to hide that fact.

Here is how White Castle works on the supply side. They know they are serving "people who don't have a lot of disposable income". I'm guessing this had to do with some sort of beef or money shortage during The Great War, but I'm not sure, cause wikipedia didn't address this.

Anyway, you make the burgers small so that Rosie the Riveter and draft dodgers can fill up on bread while still being able to tell their other poor friends that they lived it up and went out for "hamburgers". Huge margins in bread. Touche, White Castle.

But that wasn't good enough. They had to continue to cut costs at every opportunity. Hire skilled labor that is able to turn over a hamburger after 12 seconds of cooking on it's 14 square millimeter surface area? Nope, too difficult. Let's poke holes in the burgers and cover them up so that they grill on one side and steam on the other. All the while robbing their indigent, rube customers of the precious, precious meat that was poked out and probably fed to a pig they stuff under their garbage disposal.

And their fries taste like fries I made when I was 12. In the oven. With a crippling head injury. Now THAT'S nostalgia!

Anyway, White Castle has increased its sales to 500 million. Up from 40 million in 1945. Not accounting for population growth, this clearly indicates that nostalgia is a force 12.5x more powerful than ignorance. If we could harness that power, we wouldn't need to drill in the wilderness for oil. But we probably would.

White Castle also probably got a free ride from the whole "Harold and Kumar" thing. Which is ironic. The whole premise of the film and its marketing campaign is that two stoners are making a poor dining decision because they are high on marijuana. Terrific stuff, guys. Other awesome ideas stoned people have:

• Jam bands
• Frisbee golf
• Watching American versions of Japanese game shows
  
• Taco Bell

You are responsible for consuming about 1.6 White Castle burgers per year. Can we stop that?


Yes, We Can!