BURGER SCOOT

Recently, while my wife and I were running errands in and around the north area of Sacramento County we decided to have lunch at In-N-Out Burger off of Truxel Road. The food was what I expected for the California chain–good if not unique. On our ride back we noticed across Truxel Road a new hamburger joint: Nation’s Giant Hamburgers. I recognized the name, looking online I discovered this store has been there since 2020. (Obviously, I don’t get out this way very often.) The chain has been around for well over a half a century.

Going back to when I produced a burger review at least once a month, I tried to always go to the joint on my scooter and even take a pic of the place with my scooter parked in front of it. But Truxel Road is way out of my comfort zone as far as scooter rides go. Anyway, I am riding my scooter less and less the older I get. So, a couple of days later, my wife and I checked the place out by car. Not the first time I drove out to a place in a car to review a burger.

What first struck me about the fast food restaurant was that it served breakfast all day. A big plus for me even if the location was not at all convenient for return visits. If I ever come back, I will most likely go for the breakfast items. Another thing was that it sold pies–by the slice. The person who took our order even suggested a couple of slices of pie to go with our meals.

The name of the chain initially confused my wife. She recalls a time, years ago, when I couldn’t stop talking about Nation. I corrected her and said she meant Nationwide Freezer Meats, a butcher shop in Sacramento that made one of the best burgers I have ever had. I recall taking lunch breaks their when I worked downtown and love me a French Burger a very good fries while men in the butcher whites streaked with blood walked around me. Nation’s Giant Hamburgers is a far cry from Nationwide Freezer Meats, but that’s not fair to compare nearly all of the burgers I have ever had with Nationwide. I would have ate their burgers in one of their walk-in freezers. In their last years they upgraded to look more like a respectable burger joint, by then I had moved on to another lover: The Squeeze Inn. But that’s a different story and a different burger. 

The menu to Nation’s Giant Hamburgers is, not even including the seven breakfast items and nineteen pies (not including nineteen seasonal selections), robust: over twelve types of burgers, hot dogs, and sandwiches. The last type of the menu annoyingly calls “handhelds.” (It’s a fast food joint; the pie slices aside, everything is a “handheld.”) While I stopped devoting this blog to burger reviews and scooter culture, I did stick to my loose rating framework: ordering a cheeseburger or (as I did this first visit) a bacon cheeseburger and fries.  

The fries were decent though slightly soggy. They also came without salt (the way my wife likes them), but I prefer them salted right out of the frier. I used to work with someone who ordered her cheeseburger without ketchup and her fries unsalted. This was annoying because everyone else got their food fast, yet we had to wait for her stuff only to see her add salt to her fries and ketchup to her cheeseburger. “I don’t want my food sitting under heating lamps for god knows how long.” We tried to explain to her that you don’t go to McDonald’s for special orders. There was a Burger King across the street for that. They even had a (unintentionally) hilarious commercial jingle from the 1970s about special orders. She preferred to burn up our break time. But I digress.

The Bacon Cheeseburger is a respectable 1/3 lb. beef patty with two slices of melted cheese, three slices of smoked bacon, one (or was it two) slice of tomato, iceberg lettuce, raw white onions, and a mayonnaise-type dressing on a toasted bun. Nation’s Bacon Cheeseburger is alright, it’s just that in trying to live up to the chain’s name (the Giant part) they over stuff the burger with lettuce. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be any bigger than any other big burger.  

There’s way too much sauce on the burger which, with the juices from the patty, makes the bun shrink. Halfway through the effort the thing basically fell apart. My wife had asked for a knife to cut her Grilled Chicken “handheld” (that’s the last time I will use that term here–promise). Alas, it was one of those plastic (aka worthless) knives that didn’t really half her sandwich and was about as successful when I used it to make my burger a little easier to manipulate.  

By the time I was two-thirds of the way through the Bacon Cheeseburger it fell a part in my hands and then I could have also used a plastic fork. Aside from being a first-date catastrophe of a burger, the Bacon Cheeseburger was alright. As a franchise/corporate burger goes I think I’m sticking with the In-N-Out, or Smashburger, or The Habit, or Five Guys. Still, I really want to come back and try their Three Egger (three eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast) with a slice of pie!