The U’s Slinger Burger

This past Saturday, I chose to make my return to a little sandwich shop in Midtown St. Louis called The U.  It had been a very long time since I’d been there and now they’re serving breakfast.  When you serve breakfast in St. Louis, you’d better have a slinger.  So, with a faithful friend we headed out to run some errands and then get our slinger on…however what awaited us was an interesting experience….

Now, as you can guess by the title, this is not a normal slinger review because we didn’t get a normal slinger.  Being as we weren’t eating slingers, I’m considering this a slinger variant and cannot put it in the series searching for the perfect one.  However, I’ll be headed back very soon to try their regular slinger….

We arrived at The U around 12:30pm or so, we’d had some other errands that we had to take care of before getting our breakfast.  Now, breakfast here is a relatively new thing.  They’re primarily a sandwich shop catering to the college crowd at St. Louis University.  Free wi-fi, cheap beer, late hours, and delivery surely make that point, and if that wasn’t thorough enough….

They have college memorabilia all over the place.  I went through all of the college tee shirts up on the wall, and I have to mention, you have Illinois, Texas, but not a single, solitary mention of The University of Missouri at St. Louis??  I know that we’re not exactly a name school, but damn son!  We’re in town you know!!

Anyway, that had nothing to do with anything really.  I was just figuring I had to mention that.  So, my companion and I arrive and I ask her to go order our slingers while I take a few pictures of the place.

As you can see, it’s all decorated in a college theme, not only the name of the place, but the names of the dishes also. So, again, if you didn’t pick up on the college crowd aspect of the place, perhaps the crowd of eight college aged men wearing Dayton  tee shirts might have helped as well.  I was figuring a basketball game perhaps?

So, back on point!  She walks up to the counter to order our food.  She says two slingers and two large sodas please.  The behind the counter says, burgers?  She says yes.  Since slingers come either with hamburger patties or sausage patties, she thought she was simply clarifying that we wanted burgers and not sausage…..

With our food ordered we were free to have a seat and begin harassing each other and really taking the place in.  The last time I was hear, I was in the middle of a blood sugar attack, and really couldn’t focus on too much of what was going on you know?

So I noticed this time that The U is actually a diner and not a cafe, at least in my book anyway and that’s the only one that counts today, so we’re going with it.  They had guys behind the counter cooking burgers and such on a grill.  As my friend Philip once told me after going to The Buttery Restaurant, burgers cooked on a grill just have a certain flavor that make them better.  So I was hopeful.

Now, having a Ms. Pac-Man machine will definitely make this old timey gamer happy.  We had nary a quarter between us, so we did not get our Ms. Pac-Man on.  Yes, it was a disappointment.

Oh well.  What can I do?

There are a few TV’s to watch while you’re waiting for your food.  Thankfully we didn’t have a long time to wait for our food.  We literally had to drive to the southern tip of St. Louis City and the western tip of St. Louis City on two completely unrelated errands. So we were getting pretty darned hungry.

So, after about fifteen minutes or so, a man comes to our table and drops this down:

I asked him if they had a normal slinger, and he said well we stop serving breakfast at 11:30am. I had no idea about any of this. I’ve never had any problem going in and getting a slinger. At Riverside Cafe, even though we were past breakfast, they made me a slinger.

So, when he said “Burger?”

What he should have asked was “Do you want the slinger burger, because we’ve stopped serving breakfast.”

So, the slinger burger was as follows:
Bun
Hamburger patty
Dollop of chili
French fries
Fried egg
Onions
Cheddar Cheese

I wasn’t terribly pleased, but it’s what we had and that’s what we ate.  I have to say, that the burger pattie itself was very tasty.  It was wonderfully seasoned and very thick.  I hope on the actual slinger, they use that same burger forumla, because it was rockin.

All in all it was a tasty burger.  I don’t like fried eggs unfortunately.  The yolk was very runny and got all over everything and overpowered the flavor.  I think perhaps an egg over easy would work better in this situation, but here’s the real issue with the slinger burger….

Here are all but like two of my fries and the vast majority of my chili.  The thing about slingers that I love so much is the melding of all the tastes into one.  The slinger burger however, was more about the actual burger itself and not it being a slinger.

The chili and the meat patty were excellent though and this gives me great hope as to how their actual slinger would have tasted.

I will be coming back in the near future to have their actual slinger and I have to say I’m excited to try it.

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