The Riverside Lunch hamburger thrives in a world outside convention and science.
The burgers (gasp!) are unsalted.
“We don’t do anything to the meat. Nothing at all,” owner Lee Shifflett says. “When we get it, it’s ground up, and we pat ’em out. That’s it.”
It’s a fine March day for culinary heresy, and Shifflett’s holding forth outside the 90-year-old restaurant about its hallmark hamburgers. They’re smashburgers, balled with an ice cream scoop to just shy of 4 ounces and cooked on an old warhorse of a griddle. Riverside Lunch sells about 700 pounds worth of burgers a week. The only ingredients are meat, heat, and steel.
“Now that grill,” Shifflett says, jabbing a thumb at Riverside’s front door like a gladiator disappointed him. “That grill in there is seasoned big time. That grill in there is probably 30, 40 years old.”
The griddle is the shape and size of a coffee table, though likely harder on the toes if you drop it. It has room for 20 patties, if that’s all that’s on it, and it sits on four squat legs behind the bar and acts as the restaurant’s hearth. Star Manufacturing, a 100-year-old cooking equipment company, built the griddle sometime before 1992, when it replaced Riverside’s old one, which caught fire, dying as it had lived.
This griddle, which a previous Riverside owner bought used, remains in fine fettle, even if the knobs do seem to fall off and disappear too easily. Probably to the same place where all lost socks go.
The griddle doesn’t have a pet name, though it should, and it’s cleaned every night with ice and a good scrape-down. For decades, this noble flattop has seen 80 to 100 pounds of beef a day at Riverside, where these plain meat hamburgers are as beloved as they are, somehow, unsalted.
The decades-old griddle, with room for 20 patties (if they’re the only things on it), is cleaned with ice and scraped down every night.
“I would never not salt meat,” says local butcher and Riverside Lunch enthusiast Alex Import, the general manager at Stock Provisions. But at Riverside Lunch? Rules have exceptions. “That place holds a deep, deep place in all of our hearts and they crush it. They’re amazing.”
It seems we have a paradox.
“It holds true to the chemistry and the objective science that you want to administer salt to meat,” Import says. “But again, their product is delicious, and it can’t be argued with that it’s a success. If ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and there’s something there—there’s something to that.”
It seems we also have some alchemy.
Today is a lovely day, and the temperature’s in that range where it’s jacket weather and not jacket weather at the same time. Shifflett has split the middle sensibly with a sweatshirt. It’s a New York Yankees sweatshirt because as a kid he liked Don Mattingly’s minimalist batting stance and then, eventually, the Yankees as an entity.
Shifflett hasn’t shaved because he hates it, but it’s okay because stubble is rugged and becoming. And he doesn’t have a shave-everyday kind of job anymore. Before Riverside, he was a salesman for a Budweiser distributor, working his way up from the warehouse to wearing a polo shirt.
Now, he’s sitting at a patio table under the restaurant’s pediment and its three white wooden columns. An American flag lazes off the middle one. Beyond that, it’s the telephone lines and the mountains. If the sky were any bluer, we’d have to cheer it up.
Next to the table, a lady on a bicycle has stopped at a bench to have a burger in the sun. Earlier, a Colorado-looking man with a clingy dachshund made a point to tell Shifflett how often he eats Riverside’s burgers. Then they small-talked about small dogs. Later, Shifflett’s old babysitter happened in with her daughter and said hello, recognizing the boy behind the stubble.
Inside the restaurant, which is festooned with wood paneling and memorabilia, and staff you know by name, the crowd’s been steady since lunch, the parking lot heavy with pickup trucks and the cars obscured behind them.
Shifflett’s owned Riverside Lunch since 2018. It’s the patrimony of his late father Carroll, who bought it in 2008 after retiring from his career at a Budweiser distributor. (Father and son worked at the same place before reteaming at Riverside.) Carroll was a Vietnam vet and a stickler, one of those bygone fathers who liked to “build character.” For years, Carroll was a Riverside Lunch devotee and had always wanted to buy it, though his son says it’s not totally clear why. Carroll was also one of those bygone fathers who didn’t say much.
“He just always wanted it,” Shifflett says. “It was a dream of his.”
father, who bought it in 2008.
Riverside Lunch moved to 1429 Hazel St. in June 2000, reestablishing itself in what once was an auto shop. Riverside North, a splinter location, is unaffiliated. A CVS stands on the grave of the original Lunch at the corner of US-250 and River Road, where it overlooked the Rivanna River in a wilder era.
“I’m gonna be honest, when I was a kid, I didn’t want to go in there,” Shifflett says. “But my dad was, like I said, a Budweiser guy, and he would go in and drink beers, buy beers for the guys, try to get them to drink Bud and Bud Light, you know?
“But anyway, long story short, it would be like, ‘Lee, we’re going to Riverside,’ and I wanted to go to Big Jim’s—you remember Big Jim’s?” Yes, the late barbecue joint favored by former UVA football coach George Welsh. “Well, when that was around, they would have video games. I wanted to go over there and play video games and eat over there. They had Ms. Pac-Man and pinball.”
That Riverside Lunch had no video games. It was a red-brick box, short on windows and ventilation, and it was a bar only, with four tables and little else. Sometimes it didn’t even have ketchup. (That led one expeditious regular to try his shoestring fries with Worcestershire. He never went back to ketchup.) That Riverside Lunch specialized in burgers, smoke, non-draft beer, and the occasional scuffle.
“That’s where people went to drink,” Shifflett says. “I don’t know if you ever heard this, but so you know where the CVS is over there? You know how the river’s right there? Well, they used to say—and I don’t know this to be true; this is what I hear—that people would come off rafts or boats and walk up there and go get a beer because a couple of them, I heard, couldn’t drive. So they would pull up … and walk up to Riverside, get a beer or have beers and a burger, and they would call it the Riverside Yacht Club.”
Aaron Martin arrived at the new Riverside Lunch around the same time as the griddle in 2000. He started working at the restaurant the week it moved from its old location, its riverfront view abandoned.
“The old place down on the corner, women and children wouldn’t even really come in there,” Martin says with a laugh. “The old rumor was that they weren’t allowed, but they were allowed. They just never wanted to come in there. It was smoky. It was just the old beer drinkers and all that, and it was real small, and as soon as we moved up to this one we had more space, and really as soon as everything in the early 2000s when everything became non-smoking, we started pumping out more of what would be a family restaurant, and it’s been just picking up ever since.”
Virginia banned smoking in restaurants in 2009.
Martin has worked at Riverside for 25 years, one of a nucleus of longtime employees. Among them are Blanche Marshall, a 16-year Riverside vet who’s 86, thwarted cancer a few times, and waits tables from 11 to 5, five days a week. Robbie Terry is a cook with a 14-year tenure, and Tammy Morris has been a server for 18 years. They know many orders by heart.
“Just for an example,” Morris says. “If I write, just say a regular ticket wrong—like, I got two guys that come in. They get two Phillys. Pepper jack, onions, mayonnaise, jalapenos, and extra meat. One day, I forgot to write the extra meat. Aaron and Robbie’s hollering, ‘Hey, them boys want extra meat on their Phillys?’”
Martin’s done every job at Riverside Lunch. His current duties involve manning the flattop, opening the restaurant each morning, and provisioning it. Black Angus beef is delivered three times a week from the Midwest, ground, in 10-pound logs, the color a carnivorous red. The blend is 81 percent meat and 19 percent fat, a sweet-spot ratio for the Riverside griddle
“If it has more fat in it than that, it falls apart on the grill. It doesn’t stay a patty,” Martin says. “And if it’s leaner than that, it burns before it gets done.”
The cooking temperature is non-specific—“I don’t know, brother. Just hot,” Martin says—the method is smashburger S.O.P. A chilled ball of ground beef is spatula-flattened for maximum surface area, seared fast in its own fat, flipped once and cheesed.
But there’s no black pepper, no oil, no butter, clarified or otherwise, and, of course, no salt. It seems heretical because of all the nice things salt can do for a hamburger. It brings out tastes, colors, and nuances through chemical reactions that cannot happen without salt. Protein and salt have a molecular synergy. And yet, there’s something about the Riverside Lunch hamburger and that old griddle.
“Clearly, their product speaks for itself,” Stock Provisions’ Alex Import says. “And it’s fantastic.”
There’s never been salt on a Riverside burger, at least as long anyone there can remember. It’s the secret non-ingredient in a rowdy bar reborn as a family restaurant down the street and up a hill, outside of convention and outside of time.
“What I try to take to heart is,” Shifflett says, “even in the time I’ve worked here, I’ve seen kids that were like 5 years old, now they’re adults. It’s crazy. Like, I remember when you were this [kid], now you’re an adult. And one of the things I asked them, ’cause they’re still coming, is, ‘What makes you keep coming back?’ You know, just curious. And they’re like, ‘Man, it brings me back to my childhood.’ That’s where I want to be. I want to be in everybody’s thoughts—‘I can go to Riverside and it’s not gonna change. It takes me back.’”
Photos by Jeff Morgan.
