I forget if I gave up anything on Ash Wednesday back in February. Easter is almost here and I could go back to doing something important right after that. There is a lot on the plate now that I am back in the self-important city. We have to lean on the Chinese to revalue their currency, get our health care in order, reduce the deficit and win the war in Afghanistan.
 
Time to get back to work and get focused on really important stuff. Due to vagaries of the calendar, the first of April fell in the run-up to the Easter weekend, but I am completely out of phase with the liturgical calendar. I was puzzled when I dialed into Google yesterday to use the part of my brain that I leave on-line, and discovered that my usual search engine was now named “Topeka,” for reasons best known to the elves who run the digital cloud world.
 
It was gentle humor, as they claim to be, just like the Visitors from space who are planning on cooking us up like burgers.
 
Some kids up in New York had the best April Fools prank I have heard of. It had all the characteristics of a fine public hoo-hah. It took preparation, high product standards and a plausible back-story that sucked in the smart guys.
 
If you didn’t see it, and if there is not some California Dreaming in your closet, you might not have appreciated the intricacy of the joke. It tapped into a longing for something really special. The closest you can get to it in DC is the legendary Five Guys burger franchise, which limited itself to storefronts for each of the four sons of Janie and Jerry Murrell.
 
With Jerry, that made the Five Guys. The original location was in Arlington, just down the road from Big Pink, and it was a place of pilgrimage for fresh ground beef and a dizzying assortment of toppings. They did not exceed five locations in the first fifteen years they were in business, but so if you happened to be near one, there was a tendency to go in and order something, whether you were hungry or not.
 
The fries were boardwalk style, cooked in peanut oil, and there was always a full barrel of peanuts in the shell that you could husk and munch while waiting for the burger to come off the grill. It became a cult thing here in NoVa.
 
Somebody realized a good thing was too good to pass up, and the Murrells went franchise in 2002. There are now something like 500 franchises scattered up and down the East Coast and into 35 states. There is even one in Culpeper County, for goodness sake, and I haven’t been in one since they became convenient
 
I guess it is a matter of selling sizzle as much as the food.
I do not feel the same way about In-and-Out burgers. They started as small as the original Five guys, though they are much older. Harry and Esther Snyder opened the first one in the Baldwin Park section of LA. Harry knew that car-crazy Californians didn’t mind dining in their cars. Hell, they do everything in cars there, and he had a flash of brilliance that featured the cars driving right through the restaurant and eliminating the need for roller skates on the car-hops.
 
He originated the two-way speaker that enables us now to talk directly to the Clown in back of every McDonalds and Taco Bell in the land.
 
The quality of the food was what differentiated In-and-Out from Mega-Mickie D’s. Like Five Guys, the Snyder’s mission statement was “Give customers the freshest, highest quality foods you can buy and provide them with friendly service in a sparkling clean environment.” All the ingredients are specially selected, from the beef chuck to the buns, lettuce and tomatoes. The key to the geographic limitation of the In-and-Out business case was the ground beef.
 
The Snyders make their paddies in a central location and truck them out to the restaurants. They set a comfortable limit of about a hundred storefronts. The one closest to where we lived in San Diego was in National City, appropriately on the Mile of Cars. It was a huge treat to take the boys there, what with the food and the little touch of the big paper placemat they give you to keep the ketchup off the ulholstery.
 
There is another one up north of town, near Sea World and at one conference I got six burgers to cram into the little beverage refrigerator in the hotel room and ate them all week.
 
Anyway, the prank in New York was the best. Empty storefronts in several locations proclaimed “In-N-Out Burger, Coming Summer 2010.” In Union Square, kids dressed up in authentic In-N-Out Burger uniforms, and passed out hand-bills to the pedestrians.
 
There was a firestorm of anticipation on all the food blogs, and the high rollers began to think about franchise opportunities with a sort of feeding frenzy.
 
The “gotcha” moment came in the afternoon when the Snyders politely noted that they had no intention whatsoever to leave the Golden State, current economic conditions notwithstanding.
 
Depression followed all along the Washington-New York Corridor. I was thinking that I had not had an In-and-Out in years, and maybe that is what I gave up for Lent.
 
Oh well, good joke, best for April Fools. Except one, maybe, since I can’t tell. The homeless guy who works the traffic island at the long light at Glebe and Fairfax Drive had a new cardboard sign that he displayed to the waiting motorists who do all sorts of things in their cars as they wait.
 
I wondered about it all the way down into the garage under he building.
 
It read: “Need spare change until Health Care fixes everything, Coming Summer 2010. Quality You can trust.”
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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