The BURGER Project - Mike's Drive-In

February 18 , 2012

For our fourth outing we picked up a fourth member. Norm Gunning is now one of the BURGER group! We are picking up steam; we are expecting to get a grant for our future work. More on that later


Carla, Jeff, and I lived in Milwaukie back in the 80's and one of our favorite hamburger places was Mike's Drive-In on the corner of Highway 224 and Harrison Blvd. It was tiny, but good. Since then they've expanded to another site in Sellwood on the corner of 17th and SE Tenino in a place that used to be an A&W (as you can tell by the architecture).

On a side note. Friday night we went to look at Henriët's wedding gown before they shipped it her in Chicago. My job was to take some pictures. The first shot showed the gown as ivory rather than white. I've been studying how to use my Canon PowerShot S100 and new that I needed to adjust the White Balance to tungsten lighting. The following pictures were great. I forgot that setting and took the picture below with the white balance still set to tungsten; the picture came out very blue. Thank goodness for post processing. I was able to use Aperture to change the WB to account for the overcast outdoor lighting. (Update 1/20/13: I re-edited the file with Adobe Photoshop Elements 11, changing the color cast. I think this is a slightly better picture)

Norm, John, and Jay. The parking lot was full; we were lucky to find a space.

The Oregonian A&E rated Mike's as the 4th best in their top 10. I think we disagree a bit
We pretty all ordered pretty much the same thing. John and I especially seem to have matching tastes.

The shakes arrived. I love these pictures of John; he is always pondering the why's and wherefores.

 The milkshakes were everyone's favorite part of the meal. Even though they were soft serve ice cream they were very rich and tasty. They told us they use Darigold softwserve

Jay performs a thicnkness drip test.

 The burgers looked great. When I ordered my bacon cheese I upgraded from regular bacon to applewood smoked bacon. Unfortunately the bacon wasn't crisp enough. The patties were a bit small and dry and none of us were fans of the shredded lettuce.

One nice option they had was Dave's Killer Bread buns. Jay opted for this; it was a bit dry; not as soft as the classic sesame seed bun

A yummy looking burger basket

 Likewise the french fries looked great. I especially like the thinner cut. But they weren't hot and weren't salty enough (hey this isn't a health food expedition()

Norm considers the fries

 We had fun; it was a good meal. Better than Skyline certainly but not up to the Dea's In & Out.
I'm learning how to embed my Google Docs spreadsheet into the blog. Here is our pivot sheet.

The waitress took our photo when lunch was done

I've been working on embedding information from the Google Docs spreadsheet into the blog post. Not the easiest thing in the world. Hopefully with a little practice it will make more sense. For now I'm only embedding the ratings; the comments are images.

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