'The Burg' mixes comfort food, politics and nostalgia

Originally printed May 6, 2012, in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

"Okay boys," Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan said as he and his wife eyed their hamburgers warily, "it's time to turn the cameras off. No pictures while we're eating."

It was 1999, and a coterie of local journalists formed a half circle around the Ronald Reagan table at Hamburg Inn No. 2. I had just finished asking Buchanan a series of unmemorable questions about his quixotic campaign, but I was far too young of a reporter to realize that I really should have asked him what he thought of the Hamburg.

After all, both Buchanan and his immaculately dressed wife wore thinly disguised looks of confusion, even frustration, as they began to eat their hamburgers with a knife and fork.

"Didn't those campaign guys check out this place before they put it on the schedule?", I imagined Buchanan was thinking before he raised his fork and announced a forceful, "Great burger!"

His wife, sitting in half-smiling silence, probably was asking herself, "Why would there be a table dedicated to Ronald Reagan in a restaurant where the waitresses have pink hair, tattoos and nose rings?"

I could understand the Buchanans' confusion that day because I shared it. Although I already had been in Iowa City for six months, I had never before made it into the fabled Hamburg Inn.

And I can't say watching the Buchanans' discomfort was a good recommendation for the quality of the food.

In the past 13 years, of course, the Hamburg Inn really has grown into the essential campaign stop that Buchanan's schedulers recognized it as. And the national newspaper and radio stories about the restaurant's pie-shakes likewise have become journalistic shorthand for describing the equal parts wholesomeness and kitschiness that Iowa brings to the presidential selection process.

But the past 13 years also have taught me how the local importance of the Hamburg goes back long before that day in 1992 when former President Ronald Reagan ate a meal in the back corner booth and left a very healthy tip. It goes back to when, as Paul Ingram explains, the "servers were not the tattooed art students you find there now," but "grandmothers in their mid-fifties who took their jobs and their customers quite seriously." It goes back to when, as poet Marvin Bell explains, the famous and prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop "was a bohemian anomaly and vaguely disreputable."

Hamburg Inn No. 2 is now the place in Iowa City I go for breakfast most often. And when I order, I partake in a family's comfort food legacy that stretches back not only to 1948, when Fritz and Fran Panther bought out Mrs. Van's Restaurant on North Linn Street, but all the way to the mid-1930s, when Adrian and Joe Panther opened an unnumbered Hamburg Inn on Iowa Avenue and started selling burgers for 5 cents each.

For more than six decades, Hamburg Inn No. 2 has been a place where your coffee is refilled before you think to ask, where waiters and waitresses are hired on the spot, where the muse is known to strike at any moment, where college students take their parents to tell them shocking news, where mourners see ghosts from the past, and where a good omelet with home fries can take the edge off any hangover.

I'm glad Marybeth Slonneger has been working so hard to preserve the memory of "The Burg."
I only wish I had been allowed to take a photo of Pat Buchanan eating to add to her collection.

Opinion page editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen. This column is an edited version of his introduction to Mary Slonneger's "The Burg: A Writers' Diner.