Fatty-Boom-Pattie

This place is on 6th Street, right next to Red River. It doesn’t look like much from the outside – it has the same drab windows that it had when it was Paddy McFiddlesticks or Pulse (both made-up club names). But when you walk in, you are in the middle of a 13-year-old boy’s dream pad. Faux rock formations, skeletos Mexicanos, labret-piercings, and extremely red light bulbs.

The jukebox is pretty cool – though the regulars there seemed to be playing a strange mix consisting of mostly unsuccessful progressive rockers who moved to Austin and tried to play the blues (Emerson, Lee Hooker and Palmer?). Someone did play a real great song – right as I was sinking my teeth into a fantastic burger that will be hard to beat by any other place on our list. The song was Mona by Bo Diddley, and it was so good that I had to put my burger down and make sure I knew which song it was so I could steal it from the poor old guy when I got home. It went:

Hey, Mona, hey hey hey hey, Mona,

I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do,
I'm gonna build my house next door to you,
Can I make love to you once in a while?
Maybe we could do a little kissing and tellin' lies.
When I come out on the front, girl,
You'll listen to my heart goin' bumpity bump.
I need you baby and it ain't no lie,
When I'm through lovin' I'll surely die.

You might look at these lyrics and wonder why you aren’t a bluesman. Pump your brakes, because like the blues, the hamburger is a deceptively hard art to master.

A burger really is just meat, bread and maybe some lettuce/tomat. The same way that they say “Do you want that with salad?”, or “It appears that I have ruptured my kidneys, perhaps I should go to hospital.” Why does such a cultured society talk like Cookie Monster?

While you might have the essential ingredients and the special sauce, G. Love, it doesn’t mean you have the burger. Good thing for us, Casino El Camino does. They got the big balls of Meat stacked like a Mayan Pyramid – weighing each one to make sure it’s ¾ of pound. These roofy-burgers can (and did) put a person to sleep. They also make the fries from scratch – squishing them whole in a press which shoots them out with the skins still attached.

Each of the burgers is named for a place. I had the Kansas City burger, which is covered in bbq sauce, cheddar and onions. At El Camino, the bread and fixings are just a holder for the massive patties. They are awesome. I usually like mine medium-well, but my KC was very rare with a lot of pink and I didn’t mind at all.

I have to recommend the place to anyone – regardless of your opinion of North American bread meat. The only bad thing I can say about my burger was that the bun was a little burnt. But considering that the patty outweighed the bun 10 to 1, my overwhelmed taste buds hardly registered the offense.

Finally, I have to the praise the “devils” in Casino’s “hell’s kitchen”. They are the salty burger-bluesmen who prove that good food, like good music, comes from pain – usually the diners’. When I asked for mustard on my KC – the cook stared at me and wordlessly finger-flicked a yellow plastic tube. He then condensed all of the salutary post-order information into, "Name? 25 minutes.”

No love left for the patrons…what do you think's in the burgers?


Casino El Camino

Tastiness – 98%
Greasy Spoon Factor – 96%
Heavy Metal Factor – 93%
Overall Rating – 96%