This is my dinner from Saturday night. The Frenchy - it’s a cheese burger with Swiss cheese and caramelized onions and comes with a side of au jus. It’s a twist on the Blucy, the house specialty at St. Paul, MN’s newest brewpub and burger joint The Blue Door. The Blucy is in turn a twist on one of the Twin Cities’ most prized contributions to popular culture—next to the AWA, Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash, the nation’s first former professional wrestler governor, Mean Gene Okerlund, and The C.C. Club—The Juicy Lucy. That’s not two separate patties. The Juicy Lucy and its many descendants’ defining characteristic is that the cheese is actually cooked inside the burger. Many Twin Cities establishments lay claim to the Juicy Lucy but according to local lore Matt’s Bar probably has the best case of any of them. So much so that in the 90s then sitting president Bill Clinton (a man whose love affair with the cheeseburger only rivals that of his love-affair with blowjobby interns) stopped in one afternoon, secret service detail in tow, to try the Juicy Lucy for himself. It is a burger fit for a world leader disguised as food for the proletariat…and seriously, what’s better than an egalitarian cheeseburger?
