local restaurateur

I know what you're thinking: What's the big deal? I can order mini-burgers as my entrée. Yeah. You can. You can order a salad as your entrée too. That doesn't make it an entrée. It makes it an appetizer that you ordered for your entrée.

And burgers are not appetizers. Nor, while I am on the subject of words, should a burger ever be an entrée. Entrée is too froufrou for a burger. A burger is a meal. It is dinner. No, actually. It is more than that. It is its own thing. As in, "I think I'll have a burger."
Not "I think I'll have a mini-burger," but "I think I'll have a burger."

The distinction is subtle but important because there is a place not far from my house that served burgers. I mean real burgers. Big, juicy, freshly ground, hand-formed spheres of beef. They dripped down the sides of the buns with attitude, like Elvis's sneer.

The place was not quite a dive, in that neither its hygiene nor its patrons posed a health hazard. But you couldn't quite call it a family restaurant either. What it was was a glorious throwback. It was the type of place with animal heads on the walls and decorative beer signs.

To walk into that cozy, pine-paneled joint, with its noisy, pitcher-ordering patrons, and sit down at a table and order up one of those big ol' juicy burgers, oozing real, ­primal beef flavor (none of that marinated-in-wine jazz or studded-with-blue-cheese hoo-ha) was to bite into a slice of American life.

But then something happened. A local restaurateur announced that she was buying the joint, and the rumor went around that she was replacing the burgers with mini-burgers.