Suburban chic: Sliders come to Forest Lake
Chuck Haga
Star Tribune
Published Oct 2 2001
Employees wore blue-and-white boutonnieres and Mayor Ray
Daninger presided over a ribbon-cutting Monday for Forest
Lake's newest business, and a new phrase was added to the
town's culinary lexicon:
"Gimme a case of 30 sliders to go, willya?"
"You can call 'em sliders if you want," said a smiling George
Simon, White Castle's regional director. "We consider it a term
of endearment."
Sure, it was only 9 a.m., but you could smell the onions.
"It's the hot, moist, steamed onions," said Peggy Kolnberger, 79,
of Forest Lake, who left with a heavy morning sack of burgers
-- just like the sacks she used to carry home to her children
many years ago.
White Castle came to Forest Lake Monday, 75 years after the
fast-food chain opened its first Minnesota restaurant in south
Minneapolis. It joins 16 others in the state, most of them in the
Twin Cities area.
Some would call it the coming of civilization. Others would not.
"Some people are, like, 'White Castles are so gross!'" said Matt
Schneller, 17, who came in for two bacon cheeseburgers and
mozzarella sticks. "Others are, like, 'White Castles are so good!'
But there's nobody who says, like, 'White Castles are pretty
good'"
The company was founded in Wichita, Kan., in 1921, by Billy
Ingram, a livestock reporter for an Omaha newspaper, and
Walt Anderson, who had been experimenting with ways to grill
ground meat and persuade customers that he wasn't trying to
hide anything.
Unlike McDonald's, the company doesn't sell franchises but
retains ownership of its 348 restaurants, mostly in the Midwest
and on the East Coast. Its headquarters are in Columbus, Ohio.
If it makes you nervous to be far from a slider at any time, you
can move to Chicago, where there are 63 castles.
In "Selling 'Em By The Sack," a 1997 history of the company,
author David Hogan credited White Castle with marketing the
hamburger so successfully that it became Americans' "most
common meal and their primary ethnic food." The company's
success "inspired a legion of imitators and gave birth to the
multi-billion-dollar fast-food industry."
In addition to "sliders," the little, five-holed (so you don't have
to flip them) square burgers have been called "gut-busters" and
"whitey one-bites" -- by the people who love them, also known
as Cravers. Cheeseburger? That's "a slider with vinyl."
White Castle claims to be the first chain to offer frozen burgers
for sale -- demanded by cravers who lived too far away to drive
in for a fresh sackful. A group of Ohioans transplanted to
Arizona once phoned in an order for 10,000.
Roger Bosman, 50, of Wyoming, was Customer No. 2 Monday
at White Castle No. 36 in Forest Lake. (Some restaurants have
closed over the years, and others have received new numbers
after a move.)
"I've got a chore to do that brings me over here, but I planned it
so I'd be here when they opened," Bosman said. "I hated always
having to run to St. Paul for White Castles.
"It's a unique flavor they have," he said. "Either you like White
Castle or you don't. And if you like them, you have to have
them."
Customer No. 1 was Duane Mund, 70, of Forest Lake.
"I've been waiting for them to open here for two years," he said.
"I used to go to one in St. Paul, but that's a 22-mile drive from
where I live."
True believers stood on the other side of the counter, too, taking
orders and filling sacks.
"My mom used to take us out for Sunday drives that ended at
White Castle in St. Paul," Toni John, 54, said. "And I met my
husband at White Castle 35 years ago. We were both out drag
racing."
On a bed of onions
Mary Leonard, 45, the restaurant's general manager, has been
with White Castle since she was 16 and serving sliders in
Bloomington. "I eat them every day," she said. "And I make a
very good one.
"They're not what people are used to, because they're
steam-grilled on a bed of onions. If you want a hamburger, you
can go to McDonald's or Wendy's or Burger King or one of the
other places. But if you want a White Castle, you have to come
to White Castle."
(Why "White Castle"? The white building symbolizes purity
and cleanliness, the founders said, and the castle motif is to
suggest strength, or maybe endurance.)
In Forest Lake, White Castle will compete with McDonald's,
Burger King, Wendy's "and the other places."
"We have all the rest of them here," Daninger said. "We've
achieved the maximum of our goals for fast food."
In 1980, a team of six University of Minnesota students set out
to break what then was the record for slider consumption: 350
in an hour. (Who held the record then and what it might be
today are details that disappeared in onion-flavored steam, but
the locals fell just two hamburgers short. The effort did disprove
the widely held notion that "just two sliders" took virtually no
stomach space at all.)
A few of the early Twin Cities White Castle buildings, purged of
their pungency long ago, have been converted into other
businesses, but the distinctive battlements remain. The one at
33rd St. and Lyndale Av. S., for example, houses a jewelry
business.
A White Castle opened Sept. 12 in Duluth. Before that, the
most recent opening in Minnesota was in Blaine in January
1998. Simon, the regional director, said the company is looking
at other possible Minnesota locations, so people who live in
communities without a White Castle can hope. Either way.
-- Chuck Haga is at crhaga@startribune.com .
© Copyright 2001 Star Tribune. All rights reserved. |
