The Fried-Onion Burger

Oklahoma is one of my favorite places to immerse myself in burger culture. It sits in the center of what I like to call the American Burger Belt, an invisible line that can be drawn from Texas north to Wisconsin. This is where the majority of America’s primary-source hamburgers can be found; the burgers that are unaffected by time or trend. The ones that have been made the same way for, in some cases, a hundred years. One of those burgers is the fried-onion burger of Oklahoma.

El Reno, Oklahoma is the epicenter of the fried-onion burger universe. At one point there were more than nine joints in town that served this regional treat. Today only a handful of places remain, but they are preserving an important piece of American food history.