Roscoe Village Burger Fest took 2000 West Belmont in mid-July with live music and a best-burger competition, on a $10 suggested donation. The end date is unsettled: the published calendars has it as the 17th to the 19th, the published calendars as the 17th to the 18th.

The Char Is a Regional Position

A best-burger competition in this city is decided on a criterion nobody states out loud, which is how hard the patty is cooked. Chicago has an inherited preference for a char — a properly blackened, griddle-hammered exterior, sometimes to the point where a coastal eater would call it burnt.

That preference is not an accident of taste. It comes out of a tradition of griddle and flat-top cooking in neighbourhood grills and hot dog stands, where volume, speed and a very hot surface produced a specific result, and several generations of Chicagoans learned that a burger is supposed to taste like that.

The consequence for a competition is that the judging is regionally loaded before anybody takes a bite. A perfectly executed medium-rare pub burger, which would win in a great many American cities, reads as underdone here. A festival competition is therefore not measuring the best burger; it is measuring the best burger according to a local convention that the entrants have correctly guessed at.

Which is fine, and arguably the point. Regional food criticism should be regional. But it deserves saying, because the winner is announced as though a neutral standard were being applied.

One Sandwich, One Festival

Chicago does a great deal of this. There is an entire festival for a single sandwich at the Chicago Italian Beef Festival in Jefferson Park at the end of July, free, three days, for one item with a well-defined set of correct preparations.

That is a distinctly Chicago habit and it is not trivial. A city that will close a street for three days over a sandwich is a city with settled convictions about food, held by people who did not learn them from restaurant reviews. The festivals are where those convictions get performed and occasionally tested.

Roscoe Village runs two closures a summer — this one in July and Retro on Roscoe in September — and keeps getting the permits renewed.

A closed block of Belmont, a judged burger, and a local standard that the judges are applying without ever having agreed to it in writing. The char wins. It always does.