Inside Jon O'Brien's Fourth Double Cheeseburger Day Giveaway

Key Takeaways

• Jon O'Brien's National Double Cheeseburger Day giveaway is in its fourth year and handed out more than 200 burgers this week, roughly 240 in total
• Two locations: about 130 to 140 cooked at Bourbon Barrel Tavern, the rest at Flywheel Brewing
• Three-ounce patties from Local Butcher, 90 pounds of beef sold at cost, with buns donated again by StrEAT Kitchen
• Britten McDowell worked the grill line and shot the field footage himself
• Jon wants to add a third location next year, specifically somewhere downtown that does not sell food

Summary

The Experienced Eater took the week off from reviewing restaurants, because Britten McDowell spent Tuesday cooking for the county instead.

Britten got a message after last week's show asking if he wanted to work a grill. That, he says, required an in-person follow-up. Once he heard the plan he cleared his Tuesday, told Michele he was out of pocket, and went to find out what he had signed up for.

"I cleared it, I hollered at Michele, and I'm like, I'm gone Tuesday. I'm out of pocket. I got something to do."

How It Started

Jon O'Brien's version is the best part of the segment, and it is remarkably small:

"It genuinely started about four years ago. I woke up in the morning and saw it was National Double Cheeseburger Day. And I was like, hey, I'm going to make some double cheeseburgers and just hand them out to people. Not necessarily people I knew, just people that were at places that I like to go."

A dozen burgers, made at home. He passed some out at Flywheel, took the rest to Bourbon Barrel Tavern, and they were gone.

The next year he did 36, still on a flat top griddle on his stove, which is a lot of griddle time for 36 double cheeseburgers.

Then two business owners in town, Mike Claxton and Russell Thompson, told him the next year needed to be 100. Jon's reaction was that he could not do 100 doubles on a home griddle. Claxton's answer was to hand him a 36-inch Blackstone. He and a friend named AJ cooked those at the house and delivered them downtown.

This year the number was 200, and Jon decided to split it across two locations.

The Build

Three-ounce patties, pressed from custom ground beef out of Local Butcher using their tortilla press. Britten's job on the line was stacking them.

Each burger: a patty, part of a slice of cheese, a smear of bacon jam, the second patty, a slice of American, all stacked on a toasted bun.

The bacon jam is Jon's, and he is not fully giving it up:

"I think bacon jam is a wonderful condiment to just put on a burger... It's blended up, pretty much caramelized onions, bacon, and a couple other things that are secret. But then it just pairs well with that American cheese and that dill Havarti."

Jon laid out the economics himself when Grafton Sizemore asked what all that beef cost: they ordered 90 pounds of beef, and Bradshaw at Local Butcher sold it to them at cost. StrEAT Kitchen donated the buns again this year, which Jon was careful to point out is not an expectation anybody has of them.

"They didn't charge us, and that's not an expectation, but I appreciate them so much for that."

Two Hundred Burgers Is a Logistics Problem

Rachel Brantingham, who has put 20 or 30 burgers on a Blackstone at her own house, asked the obvious question: how do you manage the mess?

Jon's answer was a rotation. Every so often he pulled an insert out of the Blackstone's grease trap and swapped in a fresh one, and they went through five of them. Britten filled in the rest: they ran batches of five burgers, ten patties at a time. Britten, a former restaurant cook, called the grease trap the most dangerous thing they had going: grease, open flame, and a lot of moving people.

The patties were thin enough to cook faster than expected, so the first couple of batches were rough until they found the temperature and the rhythm. After that it turned into an assembly line. Britten put the patties down, flipped them, seasoned them, stacked them, and set them on the bottom bun. Thomas from StrEAT Kitchen capped and wrapped. Jon ran everything: buns, meat, whatever ran short.

"If you've ever watched The Founder, about Ray Kroc going to get the speedy service system, that's kind of what we had going on."

Jess Chisholm worked the room, organizing the ticket line and calling out burgers.

Britten's verdict on Jon, delivered with some Western Kentucky emphasis on the word:

"Don't sleep on J-O-B, because the dude is a gourmet."

The One That Got Away

Britten shot his own footage this week, because Michele was working the Red Brick Cottage on Tuesday and normally runs his camera. He asked viewers to be forgiving of the angles.

Then, after the last of the burgers came off the grill, he finally sat down with one. Coke in hand. Michele, who had already eaten one earlier and thought they were fantastic, got the camera rolling for his reaction.

"Greasy fingers, tired fingers, whatever, the save button didn't click. So I lost that 30 second reaction... I'm going to do some bro signs here and say, trust me, bro. That burger was awesome."

For what it is worth, Britten heard secondhand that some people hit Flywheel first, heard what was happening at Bourbon Barrel, and came over. He would not confirm or deny which burgers were better. He did note that he was told.

Why He Keeps Doing It

Jon already knows what he wants next year: one more location. Specifically, somewhere downtown that does not sell food, because he does not want to take sales away from a kitchen on a day he is handing out free burgers.

"Maybe they've never been there before. Maybe they've never met the person they're sitting next to, but now they do. And they're talking about something they're sharing together. And I think that's part about what the hospitality and the community needs to be more about downtown."

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