A Real Hamburger

Many restaurants in Tuscaloosa focus on appearance.  While that may promise excellent cuisine, sometimes it feels as if a restaurant is trying to impress its customers with mere appearance rather than the actual food.  Oasis doesn’t suffer from this problem.  It presents no illusions and it really doesn’t have an audience to mislead in the first place. Located six miles from the University of Alabama, The Oasis serves as a small get away from the relative chaos of a big college town.  A weathered, mottled green overhang wraps around the small, red brick building.  There is relatively nothing on surface of the establishment suggesting any focus whatsoever on advertising, making the building seem almost like a typical “hole-in-the-wall” restaurant.  It is anything but.

            Oasis lives up to its name.  It serves as a refuge for the hamburger enthusiast.  This restaurant understands the hamburger as it was meant to be: plain and simple.  It is an American staple.  Lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, and cheese with mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup all on top of a sizzling hot beef patty neatly tucked between two pieces of toasted bread—there is nothing else like it.  Nowadays, everyone seems to have their own special way to make it and there are restaurants completely dedicated to creating the perfect combination of hamburger patty, condiments, and bun.  As a biker bar and dive, Oasis hasn’t done anything tricky or remarkable.  If anything, what they have done that most other restaurants have not is retained the traditional authenticity of the American hamburger.

            The name Oasis is truly metaphorical.  In a town with many fast food restaurants and hamburger joints, there are few establishments that maintain any semblance of effort and care for their product.  Even sit-down restaurants like the Mugshots chain use the ever-popular frozen patty for their token hamburgers and rely on a mixture of what could be seen as gimmicks and “atmosphere” to reel in customers.  Oasis’ atmosphere is not trying to hook anyone, and thus it stands out amongst the available choices for getting an honest-to-God hamburger.  Instead, they rely on authenticity.  Their hamburgers taste and feel like an actual hand-made patty of ground beef was cooked on a griddle and paired with a bun and the proper condiments instead of being taken out of a freezer and being halfheartedly thrown on a plate with some bread and vegetables.

When I had a cheeseburger from Oasis, I was instantly reminded of the hamburgers my dad makes when he grills.  We used to throw a pound or so of meat into a bowl and knead it with our hands while we seasoned it.  The meat would always be too cold for me, so my dad would let me sprinkle the seasonings over the bowl while he mixed them into the meat.  We would then take handfuls of the seasoned ground beef and mould them into medium sized patties.  My dad would light the grill and my mom and I would set the table and prepare all the dressings. Sometimes he would come inside early to get some cheese to put on the burgers as they cooked.   I always piled ketchup, mayonnaise, and barbeque sauce on the cheeseburgers he made.  I never meant for them to be messy, but the patty would begin to crumble as I worked my way through the burger.  That’s exactly how my cheeseburger at Oasis was.  Now that I’m older, my tastes have changed, but the newly added lettuce and mustard did nothing to help keep the burger together, and that’s how it should be.  Frozen patties never do that.

Not only that, but for all the attempts at creating social atmospheres, no typical burger joint could match the hominess of Oasis.   In a way, Oasis beats other restaurants at their own game without even trying, or perhaps because they are not even trying.  All of the seats are close and crowded together, forming an atmosphere that encourages social participation.  You are going to hear what the people at the next table say, no matter how quietly they speak.  For the more social among us, there’s almost a sense in which everyone around you is included in the conversation you are having.  There are also multiple talking points, from the pictures of “karaoke stars” on the wall to the records in the jukebox, not to mention the carvings in the tables, the interesting and humorous handwritten signs, and the sometimes attention-grabbing patrons.  Out of any bar and grill place that I really know, Oasis is the one I would want to hang out at.  It feels so much like hanging out in the messy dorm room of a friend, extended to the size of a bar.

I think there is a lot that other restaurants could stand to learn from Oasis.  One cannot tailor a restaurant to be a comfortable social environment and to quickly serve consistently high quality food by separating groups from one another and from the staff while mechanizing the food making process.  A restaurant just cannot cut corners by using something like pre-made frozen patties without losing something essential in the process.  The move toward making the burger as if one were making a car on an assembly line simply to cut cost is one of the major setbacks in the integrity of today’s burger.  Placing a priority on serving food that is made the way a family would go about making it is what the hamburger needs.  The fact that Oasis is a safe haven for the traditional American burger is why it lives up to its namesake.  This modern focus on trying to engineer the perfect food eating environment and trying to create the most interesting, appealing burger on paper, ignoring the nature of the food itself,  is where most other restaurants fail.  With Oasis, the food is all that matters and everything else just falls into place.