Steamed Cheeseburgers at The Lunch Box (Closed)

The Lunch Boxed Up and Left
The Lunch Box Steamed Cheeseburgers, Meriden

After many successful years in business, The Lunch Box closed in 2019.

I never made it to the Lunch Box, but putting this page together allows me to drop a Mark Bittman article about the Lunch Box from the early 1980’s. Crazy, right?

So in light of what this page is, I’m going to skip the usual transcription from Roadfood. They made a point to say that the Lunchbox (as they wrote it) was far more than just steamed burgers. It was a tiny and much loved diner. And by all accounts it was. It became a Puerto Rican take-out joint in 2020.

What’s interesting (to me) is that Bittman’s article appeared in The Washington Post in 1984 and then again, as a more narrative fictional account. Fascinating how that works. Anyway, it makes for very interesting reading all these years later – if we’re to believe there were “hundreds of restaurants in the area” selling steamers in the early 1980’s.

Definitely worth the read if you’ve landed on this page.

Introducing Steamed Cheeseburgers!
By Mark Bittman
September 16, 1984

MOTORISTS BY THE millions have zoomed through Meriden, Conn., on Interstate-91 and the Wilbur Cross Parkway, oblivious to what is happening just off the East Main Street exit. What they’re missing are steamed cheeseburgers.

Though steaming is generally considered a healthful way to prepare food, few of us steam meat. And steaming a burger, that sacred morsel of beef (and Americana), is unheard of, except in a small area of central Connecticut within about a 10-mile radius of Meriden.

Even in New Haven, center of western learning, to hear Yalies tell it, and just 15 miles or so from the hub of this culinary phenomenon, the most common response to any mention of the steamed cheeseburger is “Huh?” That followed by “What the… ?” Yet there are tens of thousands of citizens just to the north who consider steamers (and we’re not talking about clams here) a staple of their weekly diet.

Picture yourself taking that exit and pulling up to a humble wood-frame house on Main Street, a small sign, a crowded parking lot. Picture a long, somewhat-worn counter, filled with businessmen and women, truck drivers, telephone workers. Almost all are reading newspapers. Some chat. And almost all are eating cheeseburgers topped with two ounces of astonishingly runny, pale-yellow cheese that is clearly not sliced, pasteurized process American. You are picturing the Lunch Box, the most popular daytime steamer haven in Meriden. Down the street are Barb’s Lunch and the Palace Diner. At night most people head for Ted’s.

These restaurants (and about 100 others in the area) have this in common: an innocuous-looking, 15-inch high box of stainless steel. In the Lunch Box, which seems always to be busy, cook Mike Polansky continually hovers around this steaming box, moving quickly and rhythmically. He slices a hard roll, squeezes some mustard on it, then piles on a handful of onion. He removes a small rectangular tray with a center divider from the steam box, lifts out a hamburger, then scrapes a pile of runny cheese onto it. He then refills half the tray with fresh ground beef, the other half with a crudely cut piece of cheddar, and puts it back in the box. This ritual is repeated with the same regularity and precision as that of your favorite burger chef; the difference is in the cooking and in the cheese.

Though the meat is strangely grainy, and always well done, it is moist. And the cheese is delicious, sharp and creamy, with a consistency almost like that of a fondue. The onion is good, too (mild Spanish or Bermuda onions are used almost exclusively), giving the sandwich some crunch and bite.

Middletown, a small central Connecticut city that sits a few miles east of Meriden on the Connecticut River, claims the distinction of originating the steamed cheeseburger, or so goes the story. Around the turn of the century, a man named Jack Fitzgerald (it’s said he was called Jack the Irishman) took his horse-drawn lunch wagon to various factories each day, serving steamed food. When Fitzerald opened a Main Street restaurant (Jack’s Lunch), he continued to serve steamed beef and cheese on a roll.

The steamer has since become a firmly entrenched regional specialty, not because of marketing or hype, but because it’s a good, genuine, sandwich. Up until recently, no one even considered that a steamed cheeseburger might be better for you than one of the fried variety. Besides, many folks order steamers “with the drippings,” the fat and little pieces of meat that remain in the tray after the burger is removed; don’t talk to them about the health benefits of steaming.

Steamed cheeseburgers aren’t so popular that MacDonald’s hasn’t made inroads. After all, East Main Street is as densely packed with fast food restaurants as any strip in the country, but many locals consider steamers a more-than-worthy alternative.

“People from around here don’t realize that you can’t get steamed cheeseburgers anywhere else,” says Alan Giacco, who has run Barb’s Kitchen for six years. “They eat them all their lives, then they go to New York, or even New Haven, and ask for one, and no one knows what they’re talking about.”

Dale Greenbacker, a Meriden resident, is trying to change all that. He’s sought a patent on a “Burg’r Tend’r” steam chest, and is marketing the boxes in several sizes, from a stove-top home size to a double box that will make 48 cheeseburgers at once. “I got into it by accident, really,” says Greenbacker. “Five or six years ago, one of the dowtown Meriden restaurant owners asked me to build a steaming chest for him; I had production experience and he knew I could do it.

“Then I realized that there was no manufacturer for these things and, since they weren’t mass produced, they cost $700 or $800 each. So I started making them, and I’ve got the price way down.” Greenbacker sells a small, 10-tray chest for about $125; a 24-tray chest costs $275. He reports that there are “about a half-dozen” Burg’r Tend’rs on the West Coast, and 10 or 12 in Florida.

Will the steamed cheeseburger become a national phenomenon? “I don’t think so,” says Polansky, who took over the Lunch Box from his father-in-law some 14 years ago, and who is one of the smoothest short-order chefs this reporter has ever seen. “It doesn’t seem to catch on anywhere else.”

Greenbacker hopes that Polansky is wrong, and is prepared to defend the virtues of using his chest to steam not only cheeseburgers, but nearly anything. “You can steam fish in it, asparagus, hot dogs, corn, whatever. A Vermont woman wrote me that she steamed some blueberry muffins and they came out great. And a West Hartford restaurant poaches eggs in it, and serves them with the melted cheese.”

The steamed cheese is really the key to the whole phenomenon. At the Lunch Box, “They eat cheese on everything,” says Polansky, “even on french fries.” And, looking around Meriden restaurants, one sees plain steamed cheese sandwiches, tuna melts with steamed cheese, fried eggs topped with cheese, apple pie with hot cheese, and more.

The Lunch Box is known for its cheese, and it seems that other Meriden restaurateurs are after its secret. Polansky won’t even talk about it (nor will he disclose how many burgers he sells in a day, though they obviously number in the hundreds), except to say that it’s a cheddar, that he doesn’t age it himself, and that “it’s a natural cheese; processed cheese just won’t work.”

“Most people use a New York or Wisconsin cheddar,” says Greenbacker. “For some reason, Vermont cheddar comes out stringy; it doesn’t give that creamy consistency that people like. And some people are aging their own cheese; they like it sharper than they can get it from the dairy.”

Cheddar cheese, at something over $2 a pound wholesale, is more expensive than the meat used in the burgers (although both Giacco and Polansky use “extra-lean meat with almost no fat”). And that’s how it should be, according to Greenbacker: “The cheese is far more critical than the meat,” he says. “That’s why they pay so much attention to it.”

The hard roll is also important. A good hard roll (with a crisp crust and a coarse, chewy interior) is increasingly hard to find in Connecticut (and in the rest of the country). “Logistically,” says Roger Rubinow of Ruby’s, a deli on Main Street in Middletown, “the major problem in making a good steamed cheeseburger is finding a good hard roll. Fortunately, there are still a couple of bakeries in Connecticut capable of making one.”

Ruby’s is one of the innovators in the steamed cheeseburger field, which is seeing its share of changes. “We do ours a little differently,” says Rubinow. “We season it with pepper, celery salt and garlic powder.” Greenbacker reports that some people are using beer or water flavored with bouillon cubes for steaming. But he and most others seem to favor the original product, where the flavors of the meat and cheese marry without interference from anything else.

There is one change, however, that seems to be catching on. When asked about mustard and onions, Greenbacker said he would “guess that about 90 percent of the steamers are served with them.” But Polansky, who may cook more steamed cheeseburgers each day than anyone in the world, says that “It used to be all mustard and onions, but we’re seeing a lot more with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise.”

I just found this interesting and since this isn’t a page that I care about, I’m going to post the above article again. Well, sort of. This was published in The Chicago Tribune several months later and clearly it is a fictionalized version of the above. Which… I guess was a thing in the 80’s. It’s not like anyone would be reading both the Post and the Trib, right?

STEAMERS: HOT BUSINESS IN CONNECTICUT
By Mark Bittman
May 23, 1985

The traveling salesman was feeling half-starved. He decided to stop for lunch in Meriden, Conn., rather than push on. Taking the East Main Street exit, he found himself on a nouveau-California strip. “How to avoid McDonald`s?” he wondered, not very optimistically.

Yet, to his surprise and delight, Main Street was dotted with small restaurants–Barb`s Lunch, the Palace Diner and the Lunch Box among them. He chose the last, a real hole-in-the-wall of a red shack, because the parking lot was packed, so at least the coffee would be fresh.

Inside were some small tables, Formica-topped and aluminum-rimmed, and a long, worn-looking counter. The Lunch Box was busy, noisy and crowded. Almost everybody was reading newspapers. And almost everybody was eating cheeseburgers, topped with at least a quarter of a pound of astonishingly runny, pale-yellow cheese, clearly not sliced, pasteurized process American. The salesman`s hopes rose.

Then he saw the innocuous-looking box, 15 inches high, around which the chef hovered, moving quickly and rhythmically. The burgers–and the cheese–were coming out of this box. A steam box! “What a joke,” he thought, “steamed cheeseburgers.”

Feeling the same trepidation that anyone might upon first being confronted by the idea of a steamed cheeseburger, the salesman ordered one anyway. “Mustard and onion?” the waitress asked.

Now, the salesman was an adventurous eater: He`d ordered raw octopus, jugged rabbit, pressed tofu, sometimes even a Whopper. But mustard on a cheeseburger–and a steamed one at that?

“Yeah,” he said, already trying to sound like a regular ordering his millionth “steamer,” as everyone called them.

The chef sliced a hard roll, squeezed some ill-portending yellow mustard on it, then piled on a handful of nice-looking onion. He removed a small rectangular tray with a center divider from the steam box, lifted out a hamburger, then scraped a pile of runny cheese onto it. After yelling “One up” to the waitress, he filled half the tray with fresh ground beef, the other half with a crudely cut piece of cheddar, and put it back in the box.

Though the meat was strangely grainy–it was well-done; steamers are served no other way–but it was moist. And the cheese was delicious, sharp and creamy, almost like a fondue. The onion was good, too, giving the sandwich some crunch and bite, and even the mustard added something (though the salesman was thinking that next time he`d bring a small portion of Moutarde de Meaux). “Can I have another steamer?” the salesman asked the passing waitress.

Though he didn’t then know it, the salesman had stumbled into one of Meriden`s two most famous restaurants–the other being Ted`s, which reportedly serves several hundred steamers a night. The Lunch Box is the most successful of the daytime restaurants featuring the local specialty, but there are some 25 or 30 others in Meriden and up to 100 scattered throughout central Connecticut, an area that includes most of the towns between Hartford and New Haven.

Middletown, a small city just east of Meriden, claims the distinction of being the home of the first steamed cheeseburger, or so goes the story. Around the turn of the century, a man named Jack Fitzgerald took his horse-drawn lunch wagon to various factories each day, serving steamed food. When Fitzgerald opened a Main Street restaurant–Jack`s Lunch–he continued to serve steamed beef and cheese on a roll. The popular item made its way throughout the area in due time, and has become a firmly entrenched regional specialty.

“People from around here don`t realize that you can`t get steamed cheeseburgers anywhere else,” says Alan Giacco, who has run Barb`s Kitchen for six years. “They eat them all their lives, and then they go to New York or even New Haven and ask for one, and no one knows what they`re talking about.”

Dale Greenbacker, a Meriden resident, is trying to change all that. He has sought a patent on a Burg`r Tend`r steam chest, and is marketing the boxes in several sizes, from a stovetop home size to a double box that will make 48 cheeseburgers at once.

“I got into it by accident, really,” says Greenbacker. ”Five or six years ago, one of the downtown Meriden restaurant owners asked me to build a steaming chest for him; I had production experience and he knew I could do it. “Then I realized that there was no manufacturer for these things and, since they weren`t mass-produced, they cost $700 or $800 each. So I started making them, and I`ve got the price way down.”

Greenbacker sells a small, 10-tray chest for about $125; a 24-tray chest costs $275. He reports that there are “about a half-dozen” Burg`r Tend`rs on the West Coast, and 10 or 12 in Florida.

Advocates point out that steamed food is generally healthier than fried. But central Connecticut residents eat steamers because they`re an authentic food with genuine ingredients, and one that tastes good. Besides, a large percentage of steamers are ordered “with the drippings,” the fat and little pieces of meat that remain in the tray after the burger is removed; don`t talk to those people about the health benefits of steaming.

Will the steamed cheeseburger become a national phenomenon? ”I don`t think so,” says Mike Polansky, who took over the Lunch Box from his father-in-law some 14 years ago, and who is one of the smoothest short-order chefs this reporter has ever seen. ”It doesn`t seem to catch on anywhere else.”

Greenbacker hopes that Polansky is wrong, and is prepared to defend the virtues of steaming not only cheeseburgers, but nearly anything. “You can steam fish in it, asparagus, hot dogs, corn, whatever. A Vermont woman wrote me that she steamed some blueberry muffins and they came out great. And a West Hartford restaurant poaches eggs in it and serves them with the melted cheese.”

The steamed cheese is really the key to the whole operation. At the Lunch Box, “They eat cheese on everything,” Polansky says, “even on french fries.” And, looking around Meriden restaurants, one sees plain steamed cheese sandwiches, tuna melts with steamed cheese, fried eggs topped with cheese, apple pie with hot cheese and more.

The Lunch Box is known for its cheese, and it seems that other Meriden restaurateurs are after its secret. Polansky won`t even talk about it (nor will he disclose how many burgers he sells in a day, though they obviously number in the hundreds), except to say that “it`s a natural cheese; processed cheese just won`t work.”

“Most people use a New York or Wisconsin cheddar,” says Greenbacker.

“For some reason, Vermont cheddar comes out stringy; it doesn`t give that creamy, fondue-like consistency that people like. And some people are aging their own cheese; they like it sharper than they can get it from the dairy.” Cheddar cheese, at something more than $2 a pound wholesale, is more expensive than the meat used in the burgers (although Giacco and Polansky use “extra-lean meat with almost no fat”). And that`s how it should be, according to Greenbacker. “The cheese is far more crucial than the meat,” he says. “That`s why they pay so much attention to it.”

The hard roll is also important. A good hard roll–one with a crisp crust and a coarse, chewy interior–is increasingly hard to find in Connecticut and in the rest of the country.

“Logistically,” says Roger Rubinow of Ruby`s, a deli on Main Street in Middletown, “the major problem in making a good steamed cheeseburger is finding a hard roll. Fortunately, there are still a couple of bakeries in Connecticut capable of making one.”

Ruby`s is one of the innovators in the steamed cheeseburger field, which is seeing its share of changes. “We do ours a little differently,” says Rubinow. “We season it with pepper, celery salt and garlic powder.”

Greenbacker reports that some people are using beer or water flavored with bouillon cubes for steaming. But he and most others seem to favor the original product, where the flavors of the meat and cheese marry without interference from anything else.

There is one change, however, that seems to be catching on. When asked about mustard and onions, Greenbacker guessed that “about 90 percent of the steamers are served with them.” But Polansky, who cooks more steamed cheeseburgers each day than anyone else in the world, says, “It used to be all mustard and onions, but we`re seeing a lot more with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise.”

That`s okay, Mike; just don`t start frying them.

CTMQ Eats the Roadfood List (including two steamed cheeseburgers)