LEAVE it to a former vegan to produce one of the best hamburger platters in northern New Jersey.
I can still see Mama emerging from that restaurant kitchen, carrying two hamburger platters and gabbing with her customers as if they were old friends who had dropped in to visit and sit a spell.
In a season when diners have been ordering hamburger platters instead of T-bones, the stone-cold economy is a consuming preoccupation for most of the city's 26,000 dining establishments.
When the evening crowd came in, Mama was kept busy as she trotted back and forth from the kitchen with her hamburger platters and catfish platters, but she would stop and laugh at something Lucy and Ethel were doing on the screen.
The hamburger deluxe platter ($8.50) was terrific.
Lunch at the funky Cabbage Key Inn, on tiny Cabbage Key, (941) 283-2278, features hamburgers, shrimp platters and stone crab claws.
Exuberant and cigar-smoking, he peppers his idiomatic English with references to Thomas Jefferson and American football (he supports the Dallas Cowboys), and serves hamburgers on silver platters.
But the fantastic hamburger as served on a platter at a sit-down restaurant is something else again.
Food suggestions - Doritos, popcorn, m&ms, Skittles, potato chips, fruits and veggie platter, gum, hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, and Oreos.
One of the platters justifiably turning heads in the dining room is the eight-ounce hamburger ($14) cooked precisely to order, topped with crisp pancetta bacon and Gorgonzola cheese and mated with a mountain of thinly cut, skins-on French fries.
