Sira-sira store: Burger run

AFTER a week of taking my own dose of the food prescription I shared with you last week, I have filed my leave of absence from eating veggies. It will be a long while till I eat something green again.

This week we will ride on the burger bandwagon, celebrating the delicious aroma and the juicy patties tucked between two soft buns.

It’s a fun food to take when you join the annual Mardi Gras known as the Sinulog Festival (not the religious event, we have to clarify). Here’s how to do the famed dance: Take one step forward, munch on your burger; take another step forward, much again; and take one step backward, munch. There! You’ve done the first set of steps for the Sinulog dance.

Some say a burger is a burger is a burger, but not all burgers are created equal. A fast food burger can’t stack up with a resort edition. For example, Savannah Grill’s “Powerhouse Burger” sits on a plate of crispy French fries.

The burger created by Plantation Bay is juicy and flavorful in a way that can’t be matched by fast food versions.

This does not mean that fast food burgers are out. In fact, they are in. This week they star in our burger run.

When the burger was invented in America in 1890, little did its creators (wikipedia sites Charlie Nagreen, Frank and Charles Menches and even traces the origin to Germany) know that it would become the lingua franca of cuisine. Last year, a Japanese burger chain presented its Tower of Pisa version of the burger, the five-patty tower burger.

Lotteria, the burger resto, will take custom orders of the burger. But what would we do with the extra four patties? If it’s a takeout, we can buy additional buns to go around.

No doubt, we love the burger, morning, noon or night.

Among the burgers we have tasted, KFC’s fish fillet burger comes close to healthy. The fish is moist and the breading is crunchy. Its regular burgers aren’t bad either.

There are discount burgers around town, like Mega Burger, which entices the budget-conscious co-eds or cash-strapped office workers to order the special. The patty is not made of solid beef, but it can very well coat the stomach.

Orange Brutus offers burgers plain or with cheese. The mayonnaise dressing adds flavor to the patty. It has a texture that some people may not like, but it has die-hard adherents.

Jollibee dishes out several options for diners when it comes to burgers—from double-deckers to plain ones to suit everybody’s budget. It claims to have a langhap sarap allure to the Filipino taste.

We will not say which among the burgers we mentioned is the best. Perhaps the better standard would be how much money you have in your pocket. In that case, we will fly to Japan to order that tower burger and end the burger run in style.