Fun With Carbs

Yes. That's four slices of cheese.

It took me the better part of four-and-a-half years, but I finally tried Shady Glen’s notorious cheeseburger. Maybe it would have been more fun if I didn’t know how it was constructed, because I’d probably still be speechless now.

Cardiologists and nutritionists, stop reading now. The cheeseburger at Shady Glen, a 60-year-old diner/dairy bar in Manchester, is made with four slices of American cheese. Each piece of cheese is positioned half on the grill, half on the patty, so that the edges crisp up and the center gets warm and gooey. At precisely the right moment, the cook flips up the ‘grilled’ cheese to form what almost looks like petals around the patty. Diners either bend the crispy edges inward, piling them on top of the patty, or peel them away to eat them separately.

When I first heard of this burger, I was blown away.  I wondered a.) if the griddled cheese was burnt and gross and b.) if the sheer amount of cheese would just be sickening. Happily, neither’s true. The crisped cheese blended well with its meltier counterpart on the bun, and the beef patty was nice and juicy.

We’d ordered our burgers as platters, so they came accompanied by crinkle-cut fries and coleslaw. You dress your own burger with relish, chopped onions, mustard and ketchup from a tableside condiment tray.

Shady Glen is totally retro-cool, with vinyl booths, an authentic-looking old soda fountain setup and waitstaff dressed in old-school polyester outfits. Meaning it probably hasn’t changed a bit since it opened in the late 1940s. There’s a menu board full of sandwiches, hot meals and seafood platters, and nothing seems to exceed $10.

Pumpkin sundae with butterscotch sauce

The restaurant is equally celebrated for its homemade ice cream, which you can have piled into a sundae glass or take home in a gallon container. My friend and I tried seasonal flavors – he had a two-scoop pumpkin ice cream sundae with butterscotch sauce. It was better than any pumpkin pie I’ve ever sampled, rich and cinnamony. I had a small dish of eggnog ice cream, a perfect little frozen scoop of Christmas in a bowl.

Shady Glen has been a Manchester-area favorite for decades, and I’m glad I finally got to see what all the fuss is about. I’ll be back as soon as my arteries can take another quadruple hit of cheese.