Dining

Thirty-two! Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Thirty-two!

Brian Bottger is shouting as he leans out the window of the Only Burger truck, hovering over two dozen hungry, near-drooling customers who have lined up in front of him on the pavement. It’s 8 o’clock on a sultry Friday night at Golden Belt, where the arts complex’s Third Friday event is in full swing, and Brian is searching the crowd for the customer whose order he holds in his hand. Finally, Number Thirty-Two shows up. As he swaggers toward the window and Brian leans out to hand him his bag of grease, the looks on the faces of the people around him say it all: You would think that Brian just handed him a bag full of $100 bills.

As Brian and his right-hand man, Daniel, work — spinning and shimmying around each other as they take orders, flip burgers and shake fries out of the fryer basket — I’m trying to stay out of the way, wedged in a spot between the driver’s seat and the cash register. There’s no room to spare on the Only Burger truck — on one side, you have the grills and the fryer. On the other is a sort of assembly station where the orders are put together, an ice chest stocked with drinks and the cash register. The truck is parked on an incline (“I don’t know what it is, but I can’t ever seem to get this thing on even ground,” Brian says). So the two of them spend much of the night sliding down the narrow alley between the counters as if they were on roller skates. It is a cramped, crazed, carnival funhouse atmosphere inside this thing, and it is hot — the kind of sweltering heat you can feel in your throat. It’s a claustrophobic’s nightmare. But the burger? The burger is a dream. Let it be said for the record that I am a carnivore through and through, a woman who can answer without hesitation that if I had to pick my last meal, it would be a cheeseburger. I know burgers, and this is a good one: a messy, grease-running-down-your-arm hunk of meat that must be eaten with two hands. Bottger and Tom Ferguson, the guys who run Only Burger, say their product is “the only burger you’ll ever want.” They just might be on to something.