The ‘Depression Burgers of Route 66’

Sid’s Diner, a popular lunch spot in El Reno, a town west of Oklahoma City along Route 66 in Oklahoma, is hopping at noon. Most diners are eating a sandwich whose origins were in poverty, but which became famous through love.

Adam Hall, who is the second-generation owner of Sid’s Diner after his father Marty Hall has retired, works the flatiron grill. He presses a patty of juicy beef mince with sweet onion slivers on the searing heat. While the meat is cooking to a crispy crust, he flips over the burger, onion side down, and lets the grease from the grill do its magic.

Marty has flipped over five million hamburgers during his lifetime. He has made a career out of the Oklahoma fried onions burgers, which are thin patties of beef filled caramelised onions and served on flat-grill crisp buns. He has even created his own “onion-burger spatula” made from a masonry shovel.

He has lost one wife, but gained a second. His own three children – Adam now taking the reins of the diner – were born into the smell of onion burgers and have diner blood running through their veins. The Oklahoma fried onions burger was created in the Great Depression to fill the gap left by the lack of food. It earned the nickname “Depression Burger”.

In the 1930s during America’s Great Depression, hamburger meat was very expensive. In El Reno, a dreamer, Ross Davis, and his father, opened the Hamburger Inn. They were able to secure a prime spot along the newly-opened Route 66. This was just as the economy began to crumble.