Why You Should Skip The Veggies On Your Next Bar Burger

A night on the town can take you a lot of places, mostly dance floors and dive bars, where the focus is on the drinks and the DJ. Even if you had a bite before you went out, all that dancing and drinking usually leads to a late-night search for food. After you've put in all the effort to order your martinis like a pro, enjoying the best cocktail bars in New York City, or going out on the town anywhere else, you won't be able to resist looking at the menu when hunger strikes. And if you're at a place that specializes in drinks, there probably won't be too much to choose from. Bar food is a notoriously homogenous array of fried things from the deep freeze and maybe a burger or sliders.

There's nothing wrong with grabbing some greasy bar food to balance out the rest of the night's indulgences. But if you're going to order a burger from the bar, you might want to ditch the veggies and just order it plain, with a side of fries of course. The reason is because bars, particularly dive bars, aren't know for stocking the freshest, highest quality hamburger fixings. You'll be lucky if your burger even comes with the option of anything beyond onion, tomato, and lettuce, and those fixings will likely be less than awesome, not very crisp, and disappointing when your burger arrives.

The concept of a dive bar is simple, it's a place to get a good drink and maybe a slice of conversation — not where you go to get a gourmet burger. And a bar doesn't have to be a dive to serve basic food. Plenty of specialty bars and cocktail lounges only serve a select array of food, if any. Bars serve that food do so for a lot of reasons and most them have nothing to do with a love for fresh ingredients. Bars that have a menu serve food to keep customers from going somewhere else for a bite to eat, to offset any over-serving that might be happening, and simply because the regulars asked for food. But, if a bar's focus is on its cocktails, handcrafted beers, or just on being the local dive, effort put toward the food menu will be minimal. 

If your bar burger does come with a few fixings, you might be disappointed to find yourself chewing on limp lettuce and mealy tomatoes. These subpar vegetables will provide hardly any taste and a mushy, annoying texture you might want to do without. Instead, order your burger plain and use condiments, like the classic ketchup and mustard pairing, to add some flavor. You could ask for some pickled garnishes from the bar to add to the experience, especially if you are at an establishment that features blue cheese olive-stuffed martinis, for example.