O Happy Burger Week. There are over 60 fine restaurants listed on the official Burger Week website, but I want to take a moment to talk about the one glaring omission that all true Dalhousie burger enthusiasts ABSOLUTELY MUST experience. First though, a little background.
I love hamburgers.
I was raised to know a good hamburger when I encountered it. Growing up, my mom made the best hamburgers for miles around. When she made hamburgers my friends would mysteriously appear, and I know it wasn’t for the pleasure of my company. Once my friend Carolyn and I ran all the way home from the movie theatre on a hot tip that my mom was making hamburgers.
Hamburgers are awesome.
The hamburgers my mom made were not tremendously complicated. They were simple patties, made with tried and true ingredients and cooked to perfection. They were ‘home’ burgers, the ultimate comfort food, made with love.
For years I searched for the experience outside my mom’s kitchen. Restaurants never really gave me that experience with their hamburgers. Most restaurants I’ve gone to have super expensive burgers that taste like the frozen patties you get from Sobeys. I’m not spending $15 on a frozen patty. Then there are the burger places that have zany toppings like peanut butter or ice cream but look at me like I’m a knuckle-dragging buffoon because I just want ketchup, mustard and cheese with some onion and lettuce. Honestly, with some of these more elaborate places, they seem so focused on putting crazy toppings on their burgers that they forget about the quality of the burger itself. Don’t get me wrong, if you want a more unique type of burger, that’s cute for you, but it’s not cute for me. I need substance over style.
For a long time I just assumed that to get that ‘home’ burger experience I would forever have to go to my mom’s house like the food mooch I kind of am.
All of this changed when I went to Westcliffe Diner on the corner of Oxford and Bayers Road. My fiancé had been hyping this place for some time, but I was skeptical. The menu advertises a cheeseburger and fries platter for under $5–how could a spot with such cheap food also have the best burgers in the city? Eventually I went there and ordered the bacon cheeseburger. I was told to set my expectations high, but what I got was better than I could have imagined: it tasted like a ‘home’ burger, my mom’s burgers.
Westcliffe burgers are high quality local beef, grilled to absolute perfection every single time. The bacon is amazing: thick, high quality crispy goodness. Nothing tastes like it has been frozen or processed—it is all fantastic and fresh.
The restaurant owners are wonderful too. Bev and Tyler have created a warm and friendly environment that makes you feel instantly comfortable. It’s a homey environment with great food and great company. I can’t say enough good things about it.
Their burgers are comfort food in the truest possible sense. Last September, my father died and naturally it was a horrible time for me. A few weeks later, to get me out of the house, my fiancé took me to Westcliffe. The combination of the delicious comfort-food cheeseburger and the friendly, personable environment put me in a better frame of mind than I had been since my father’s passing. Maybe that sounds ridiculous to some people who read this, but for me, that warm-hearted combination was exactly what I needed when I was low, and I’ll always feel that much more attached to Westcliffe as a result.
I can’t say more about Westcliffe without writing a sonnet about it, so I will conclude
this by saying that if you are looking for a comforting, expertly made burger, you won’t find any better than Westcliffe—and the prices are pretty amazing too. You won’t find Westcliffe in the Burger Week listings, but I can only assume that is the work of the Illuminati, determined to hide the secret of this amazing little corner of heaven from the burger-seeking masses.
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