01 June 2009
 
Five Guys

(President Obama Visits the Five Guys on South Capitol Street- Getty Photo) 
 
It was a thrill when we heard about the President’s first public burger run. He went to Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington a couple weeks back with the Smokin’ Joe, the Vice President, and I understand he picked up the tab.
 
That is normally the way Joe operates, anyway, but I have no confirmation of that for a fact.
 
Late last week the President stopped by another local institution, the Five Guys storefront restaurant.
 
He did not visit the original location, which no longer exists. It was in he Westmont Shopping Center. To the best of my knowledge, the next oldest, and hence most authentic, is the one next to the bike store at Beauregard and King in Arlington.
 
We used to make pilgrimages there from the Pentagon, and it was one of the places I most enjoyed taking the boys when they were smaller. The key to Five Guys, not to get bogged down in the narrative, is that the chain features fabulous never-frozen ground beef and fried potatoes that are identified by the very field from which they were rested from the soil.
 
The back-story is part of the legend. The chain was started in 1986 by Janie and Jerry Murrell on behalf of their four sons. Maybe it is apocryphal, but the story is that Jerry told his four sons that they could either get a business or a college education, their choice. The family decision was to open storefront restaurant, with the aim of expanding to have one for each son operate.
 
Another son was born in 1988, which complicated matters, but there was a serene confidence in their product that was quite justified. They used McDonald’s market research to identify prospective high-traffic areas, and were happy to open up right next door and shoot it out with them.
 
The menu is straightforward. Besides the one and two patty burgers, there are kosher-style hot dogs and grilled cheese and vegetable sandwiches. Simplicity is key: there is only one side item, the fresh-cut French fries fried in peanut oil and served boardwalk-style. The grease from the fries and the foil-wrapped burgers stains the  paper bag, and as Garrison Keillor observes on Prairie Home Companion about his imaginary Powder Milk Biscuits, serves to demonstrate freshness.
 
It was a purely local enterprise right up until 2002, when the Murell’s decided to franchise, and I am not going to get into the mind0boggling expansion that happened since. After some corporate controversy, former Redskin kicker Mark Mosley wound up as the director of a burgeoning burger empire with hundreds of outlets from the East Coast to California.
 
The best West Coast burger, in my humble opinion, is the In-and-Out Burger of southern California, but I digress. You will not see one of those shooting it out with Five Guys. The estate of Harry and Esther Snyder will apparently not consider the franchise route, preferring to have a small number of restaurants under rigid central control.
 
With so much expansion, it will be interesting to see if Five Guys can maintain the standard of excellent for which they are famed. In-and-Out and Five Guys share a commitment to freshness: "Give customers the freshest, highest quality foods you can buy and provide them with friendly service in a sparkling clean environment."
 
The Five Guys store that the President went to meets that standard of cleanliness. The original places didn’t. There was no place to sit down, the complementary peanuts were hulled as you waited, and then thrown on the floor.
 
Oh well, great burger, chain or not. The First Lady took the kids to one last year, and the one at which the President stopped was a new outlet near Nationals Stadium.
 
The area was one of the more blasted slums in town until just before the stadium project got underway and major league baseball came back to the nation’s capital. The neighborhood west of the Navy Yard was long home to some very strange activities.
 
The famous mega-nightclub Trakks was there, which featured a Heterosexuals Night on Thursdays, and some transvestite cabarets, and a lot of places you could get robbed and killed with no effort whatsoever.
 
There was also a nest of Spooks at the Yard’s Building 213, which later began a much more pedestrian outlet for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which led to one of the more interesting features of the President’s visit.
 
He ordered a burger with jalapeños, tomato, lettuce and mustard, apparently eschewing the catsup. He got several burgers to go for the entourage, and one for news anchor Brian Williams, who was filming a day-in-the-presidential life.
 
Working the crowd and munching on the complementary peanuts, the President talked to an office worker, and asked him what he did. The guy’s name was Walter, and he was a government analyst. He was clearly a little taken aback by having a lunchtime conversation with his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. He said he worked at NGA.
 
The rest is form the CSPAN transcript, since I can’t make this stuff up:
 
Obama: Outstanding, how long you been doing that?
   
Walter: About six years
   
Obama: Yea?
   
Walter: Yes.
  
 Obama: You like it?
   
Walter: I do, keeps me...
   
Obama: So explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial...uh...
   
Walter: Uh, we work with, uh, satellite imagery..
   
Obama: Right
   
Walter: [unintelligible] ...support systems, so...
  
 Obama: Sounds like good work.
   
Walter: Enjoy the weekend.
   
Obama: Appreciate it.
 
The exchange shows that the President is curious about all the stuff that he is running, and is clearly an approachable guy. There is no word about what happened to Walter when he got back to work. I know the Director of his agency, but I wouldn’t think to waste his time by calling him up to ask.
 
Some commentary followed that, decrying the fact that the Chief Executive was apparently not familiar with all the components of the Intelligence Community. There is nothing in this town that cannot be made controversial, even the part about weather or not the President likes catsup. Some say that the motorcades are wasteful, and he ought to just have the Executive Chief whip something up at the White House.

I say the flap is nonsense. I am stumbling over new Agencies I haven’t hear of all the time.
 
You could have knocked me over with the feather when I was visiting the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) one time, and discovered that there was a sister Agency called the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
 
I think you could go out for burgers a lot in this town and never get around to all the components of the Federal bureacracy.
 
I like the Mr. Obama's style. It is about transparency. I’m glad the President is doing his research out front, and not sneaking around McDonald’s like President Clinton used to do.
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com