One of the weirder things about the metro area is its healthy fast food: Burgerville. Or at least, foodie-friendly fast food. But who knew the chain has an actual chef?
Becky McGrath is the chef of Vancouver, Wash.-based Burgerville, the sort-of healthy fast-food chain that makes the metro area a little different from the rest of America’s drive-thru culture.
New on the menu for April 2023, McGrath has created the Seasonal Pepita Salad ($6.49) in a 24-ounce plastic box. It consists of tender, leafy greens or spinach, with garnishes such as dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds. The crown of the salad is red and green cabbage, finely shredded. In another season it might have radish or asparagus.
Customers can add a protein such as chicken, either fried or grilled.
“But you can get one of our burgers to put on there, like our grass fed burger or our vegan, plant-based burger, the Beyond Burger,” McGrath told Pamplin Media recently. “And that would keep the whole meal completely plant-based.”
Practice saying that at the drive-thru intercom.
McGrath is part of Burgerville’s three-person product team. She speaks with genuine enthusiasm about the food they make.
“We typically throw around some ideas about what’s in season, what’s going to have some color impact and some textural impact. I like pumpkin seeds on things, because they’re not necessarily crunchy, but they have a nice nutty flavor to them,” she said. “Cranberries are something that people really enjoy this time of year, a tart flavor. And cabbage, it has a bright flavor and a textural crunch, at a time where you’re eating a lot of food that doesn’t have a ton of bright flavor or crunch because it’s wintertime, mostly squashes.”
She says cabbage lasts several weeks after it is harvested, year-round, in places such as Yakima and Olympia in Washington. Part of the Burgerville brand is talking about the origin of the ingredients, like a posh restaurant. The words on the menu are as important as the photos.
More fish on the menu
Also new this spring is a cod sandwich. Burgerville did offer little bricks of cod 15 years ago, seasonally. McGrath couldn’t find the recipe for that, so she is presenting the beer battered cod with a coleslaw in a light, mayonnaise base with a touch of whole grain mustard, and apple cider vinegar mixed into it.
“My cabbage mixture has got green cabbage, some red onion, some green onion, and a little bit of carrot,” she said. “It’s got a lot of bright color, and a nice, full flavor.”
Vegetables are all pre-chopped by Penny’s Salsa and Fresh Produce in Sumner, Washington, because a lot of the Burgerville staff are in their first job and don’t have any knife skills.
She does. McGrath’s parents were late 1980s hippies, near Grant High School, who cooked from scratch. Her dad worked at Kienow’s grocery store and received surplus produce. Mom had a garden.
McGrath has seven siblings, and they were all expected to cook. As a teen, McGrath was inspired by a Today Show piece on the Ballymaloe Cookery School, Organic Farm and Gardens in Cork, Ireland, and became obsessed.
After high school she went to the Western Culinary Institute in Southwest Portland, then to Ballymaloe. Back in Portland, it was cooking in pubs, then to New Seasons, where she learned to connect with farmers.
Seven years ago, she moved to Burgerville as a chef — having never worked fast food, premium or otherwise.
Now half her job is coming up with new menu ideas, and half with training people how to make them.
That cod, from Orca Bay Seafoods near Renton, Wash., is cut to a regular rectangular size, and the sandwich must be wrapped in paper to go.
“A lot of times people are taking it with them to enjoy it,” she said. “Most likely back at home or at the office. So, we want something that is going to be easy to bite into.”
Burgerville is known for its halibut, but this is an affordable option, suitable to 2023’s hard times.
“It’s at a time of year (Lent, the 40 days before Easter in some religions) where our fish sales will lift quite a bit, so we wanted to get folks to try something that had a distinctive, different flavor,” added McGrath.
McGrath said seasonal offerings sell probably a few dozen, per location, per day, whereas they sell millions of the original cheeseburger per year.
Meat and alternatives
Burgerville was always known as vegetarian friendly, offering a beanburger that tasted of spicy beans — but it had mayonnaise and dairy cheese.
That burger has now been replaced on the menu by a vegan burger. The Plantville Cheezeburger has a Beyond Burger patty (plant-based burger), with Secret Aardvark vegan aioli, an eggless mayonnaise, and Good Planet Foods’ vegan pepper jack, which tastes like dairy cheese.
“We created that so that we would have more offerings that were completely plant-based. A lot of folks in this area have been asking for a plant-based alternative,” McGrath said.
They have learned from making burgers with so many different ingredients they slow down the line.
“There’s a breaking point where you just have too much on one item,” she said. “We did one with seven different components sourced locally.”
The bun from Franz Bakery, Rogue blue cheese, mushrooms from Yamhill County, the aioli from Washington etcetera. McGrath explained that Burgerville guests don’t get too picky with customization, and the firm avoids products where “it almost takes longer to say it than consume it,” she jokes.
Do fries go with that shake?
After such healthy fare, the temptation is to treat yourself to a gigantic sugar bomb.
Burgerville’s latest milk shake, The Waffle Cone, includes a collaboration between GroundUp, the female-owned (and local darling) nut butter company, and chunks of the gluten-free waffle cone from Kate’s Ice Cream.
The result is a milkshake with hazelnut butter, waffle cone and chocolate chunks in it. McGrath tasted GroundUp’s collab, and her team played around with other flavors to see what worked. They always work in a store where the ice cream set up is off to the side, which lets them tinker without getting in anyone’s way.
“I just kept plugging away, thinking what needed to be incorporated into it, and how are we going to present it to the guests,” McGrath said.
The milk shakes use a specific Alpenrose ice cream blend, a creamy neutral base, to which vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and more flavorings are added. The shakes are made one at a time by staff in a traditional blender, like in a malt shop from the 1930s.
Speed matters
“You can’t do a milkshake that’s got so many ingredients that it takes them four minutes to make one shake; they’ve got to be able to make 10 shakes in four minutes,” she said. “Hopefully more than that if they’re really good at it.”
And for an extra new treat? Chili cheese waffle fries might not sound very healthy…
“But they’re delicious. I mean, it’s waffle fries. Deep fried, with chili and cheese. People absolutely love them,” McGrath said.