A rainy morning may have threatened the first ever Burger Wars Street Festival, but the once the rain dried up, a warm afternoon turned into a busy evening on Scott Street.
Owner of Talk On The Street Eatery and Burger Wars organizing committee member Cathy Handberg says when she saw the rain Friday morning she was disappointed.
“I seriously felt discouraged,” she said.
“I was watching the weather from the minute I knew the 14th day on there was Sept. 12. I watched it every day, sometimes several times a day and two weeks ago it was calling for rain and I was super bummed out. Then about a week before it changed to sunny, partly sunny with a 40 per cent chance of rain. I think it was a day or two before it switched back to rain and I was like ‘are you kidding me?’”
Thankfully mother nature cooperated, and while organizers got wet working on setup for the event, by the time it was due to start around 11 a.m. the grills were heating up and the rain was mostly gone.
“I set up in the pouring rain, I was soaked,” Handberg said.
“Kudos to the three Lakers that came out and helped us because it was me, the three Lakers, Katrina from the Museum and some others from Future Development Corp. It was basically us that set up all the tables and set up downtown. I had to go home and change, I was drenched.”
The festival was a product of a collaboration between Handberg and a group of dedicated committee members. Including Jennifer Horton of the Pink Parasol Tea Room Nicke Paddock from Northern Community Development Services (NCDS), Jessica Miller from the United Native Friendship Centre, and Angela Halvorsen Smith from the Rainy River Future Development Corporation.
Handberg says she started working on the idea for the festival earlier in the year.
“I kind of had a vision for it in February or March and just kind of slowly worked towards making it happen,” she said.
“We formed a committee and did a lot of work, a lot of planning, a lot of putting our heads together.”
What resulted was a five truck burger competition which saw more people on Scott Street in one day than some people have seen in a very long time.
While Handberg didn’t have an exact numbers of visitors on hand, she said once she started her griddle she was smashing burgers all day.
“I smashed burgers from 11:30 a.m. until 8:30 at night, my back was on fire by about 6, so I popped some Aleve and just kept going,” she said.
In the end, Handberg’s hard work paid off and many people enjoyed the festival, and her burgers specifically. Talk on the Street Eatery won the ‘Best Sauce’ award as voted by the patrons.
“I was happy,” she said.
“You know, honestly, I wasn’t in it to win it. I really wasn’t. I wasn’t in it to win anything.”
Handberg said originally the only prize was going to be for top burger, but the committee members suggested additional prizes and they settled on a single ‘consolation’ prize. After some discussion they landed on Best Sauce, which Handberg says she does get a lot of compliments on.
“The 8-Smash Sauce is special,” she said.
“I get lots of compliments on it and I’ve been told I should bottle it and sell it. Maybe some day I might do that.”
The grand champion of the day was John Homer’s Zamburger. Homer and several friends bought a decommissioned ice resurfacer a few years ago and christened their friend group the “Zambronis” (despite the ice resurfacer not being Zamboni in make and model) and have driven it in local parades, at the Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championship towing boats in the top 10 through the tent, and as a photo opportunity at on prom day, but retrofitting it to serve as part of their food truck operation was a different challenge altogether.
The Zamburger ice resurfacer served as the backbone of their operation, which did primarily take place on the ground next to the machine with a pair of flat top griddles, deep friers and a crock pot full of smoked beans.
Homer said the championship-winning burger was a labour of love that he worked on all summer after hearing about the event.
“All summer long we’ve been taste testing burgers, to come up with the ultimate burger,” he said.
“The weekend before we had our final testing party and I tested it for 10 people, we probably tested 40 to 50 burgers over the summer and we narrowed it down to two. At the end of the day all 10 picked the burger we went with.”
Homer says there was a combination of wet and dry ingredients added to the ground beef used for his patties. While some vendors chose to serve a portion of a full sized burger for the competition, others went with a smaller, slider style burger, which was what Zamburger served.
“One of the key ingredients was bacon,” he said.
“It was the wet ingredients that kept it moist in the middle but still crunchy and seared on the outside, not a lot of spices.”
Homer believes his sauce was hit but also complimented his competitor’s winning sauce as well.
“We had a sauce that went along with it that got a lot of compliments,” he said.
“Obviously we didn’t win the sauce [portion of the competition] and deservingly so, Cathy did because her sauce was phenomenal, but we did have a lot of compliments on our sauce.”
Homer says his team, which consisted of fellow Zambronis Josh Jean and Patrick Briere, debated what to include on the burger, considering lettuce and tomatoes and other toppings but went simple instead.
“I’m glad we went with that decision because the way it went in the evening and how packed and busy it was… we had prepped 340 burgers and by 4 or 4:30 I realized we were going to run out long before the 7 p.m. deadline for the contest.”
They ended up going to Safeway twice for additional ground beef to make it through the night and still didn’t have enough burgers to last right until 7 p.m.
For their bun Homer decided to keep things local and bought his slider buns from the Rainy River Bakery which they toasted with mayo on the flat top griddle, topping the burger with cheese and bacon his special sauce and you get a battle winning burger.
Overall Homer says he was very impressed with the event.
“I think it was phenomenally run,” he said
“I think the town turned out in droves for it. I love that there was music playing. It added an atmosphere to downtown that I haven’t seen in a long time, me being a downtown business owner and a Fort Frances resident, I thought it was awesome.
“You know, there’s things I’ve heard people say they need to tweak for next year. And I’ve actually talked to two of the organizers actually, and they agree. There’s a couple things we could do as vendors and as organizers, just tweak it just a little bit, but I wouldn’t change too much, because, you know, we gotta get the lines down, and that’s on us, the vendors.”
Handberg agreed that there are things that can be improved upon going forward, but that this was a great success for a first event.
“There were some things that didn’t go perfectly, obviously, and we’re taking a lot of notes on stuff like that,” she said.
“We’ve got a survey out to try to get some feedback from the community and vendors and other food trucks to see if there’s something we could do differently or do better. In the grand scheme of things I think it was pretty much 98 per cent a success.”
The link to the Burger Wars feedback survey is available on the Burger Wars Street Festival Facebook page.
