Tendermaid Hamburgers: Loosemeat Sandwiches in Austin, MN

As you may have gathered, the family has been on a road trip for the last week or so. We drove like madmen Wednesday through Saturday of last week in order to get to eastern Washington by Friday night and spend the weekend with my sons’ grandparents and cousins. We spent the weekend catching up with family, and while we were mindful of social distancing and masks were worn when near the most elderly, there were certainly a few hugs exchanged before the weekend was over.

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So it was that we found ourselves somewhere between Spokane, WA and Missoula, MT last Monday while a tornado touched down in our hometown, tearing due east down 151st street, passing just a block south of our home and knocking out power for the entire town. I’m not sure exactly what we were doing at the time–frolicking by a lake, visiting an old mining town, or looking out over a high mountain pass while driving through the panhandle of Idaho? It could have been when we stopped about 10 miles into Montana to buy cherries, huckleberries, and the best jerky any of us have ever had from a charming and multi-function but scarily mask-averse hotel office. Certainly it could have been while we idled a while, accepting the proprietor’s invitation to splash around the beautiful river behind the motel. I can’t say for sure exactly what we were up to while our neighbors were cowering in doorframes as their roofs were torn off and their trees were knocked down.

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Regardless, while they spent the week without power, we were driving east, taking our time and enjoying the sights, eventually making our way to Austin, Minnesota. I did not know this when we originally booked our room there, but Austin, Minnesota, apart from being the ideal place for us to stay on the final night of our drive back to Illinois, is also the home of Hormel Corporation, makers of such fine products as Skippy peanut butter, Dinty Moore beef stew, and favorite of the Tribunal, that fabulous tinned pork product SPAM. In fact, it turns out they have a SPAM museum right in downtown Austin.

The SPAM Museum is taking social distancing seriously, only allowing groups to come in by twos, taking temperatures, requiring hand-washing, and handing out sanitized stylii so people can avoid using their fingers on touchscreens. They’ve also closed off a number of areas that would be more difficult to keep sanitized properly, such as a child’s play area and some exhibits with multiple small pieces to manipulate. Still, it’s free to enter and it’s not a bad way to spend a half hour or so on a family road trip. Plus, there’s a SPAM gift shop next door.

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Sadly, the SPAM Museum was not pet-friendly, so while I was inside learning the alchemical secrets of potato starch and sodium nitrite, Damian was walking our dog around the block and waiting for us to finish. When we got back in the car, Damian asked me if I knew what a “Tendermaid” hamburger was. I did not, but I wondered why they were asking.

As Damian explained, just around the corner, mere steps from the SPAM musem, was a cute little shack selling said “Tendermaid” hamburgers. A quick Google search located their Facebook page, where it became apparent that Tendermaid’s “hamburgers” were in fact loosemeat sandwiches, similar to “Tavern” sandwiches or the Maid Rites we wrote about last year.

Tendermaid doesn’t offer fries or onion rings or mozzarella sticks. They have some hot dog offerings, and they do malts and shakes, but the focus of the establishment is their loosemeat sandwiches. There are dog-friendly picnic tables outside where you can sit down to eat them, which I can assure you is to be preferred over trying to manage a loosemeat sandwich while navigating an SUV down I-90. And I’ll be damned if the ladies inside aren’t just about the nicest folks I’ve ever ordered a sandwich from.

Their menu offers the Original (plain old loosemeat burger); a cheeseburger (loosemeat with your choice of American, Pepperjack, or nacho cheese); a bacon cheeseburger (loosemeat with choice of cheese plus bacon); a chili cheeseburger (loosemeat with chili, nacho cheese, onions, and jalapenos); a Western burger (loosemeat with barbecue sauce, pepperjack cheese, bacon, onion, and pickle); a bacon ranch burger (loosemeat with Ranch dressing, bacon, and American cheese); and the Tender Island, their take on the Big Mac with 1000 Island dressing, onions, and pickles. We ate damn near all of them for lunch. I’m proud to say that nobody in my family was interested in the Ranch dressing burger.

“Everything” on most of the Tendermaid burgers means ketchup, pickle, onion, and mustard. The meat appears to be unseasoned before or during cooking–it is placed raw into a steam cabinet next to the steam cabinet the cooked meat is taken from when sandwiches are assembled; it seems to cook right there and I never did see anyone season the raw meat–but is seasoned liberally from a single shaker after it’s been ladled thickly onto the bun, before the toppings are added.

They’ve got pickle slices, and pickle relish, but they also appear to have finely minced pickles that are used in some sandwiches. The onions are also finely minced, as are the jalapenos. Even the bacon pieces for the bacon cheeseburgers and Western burgers are chopped up into little pieces–not bacon bits, it’s real bacon, but cut up fine to match the loosemeat more closely.

They don’t serve different sizes the way the Maid-Rite we visited in Quincy does. There’s only one size, and it appears to be as big or bigger than the largest sandwich Maid-Rite offered. The meat also appeared to be less finely ground and leaner; it didn’t adhere together by its fat content the way that Quincy’s Maid-Rites do. That may make for a healthier and a more filling sandwich, but meat against meat, I’ll take the Maid-Rite filling over Tendermaid’s any day.

The chili burger–Mindy’s favorite of the sandwiches, and very good, but somehow also wrong; defiantly unbound by sandwich convention, comprised of a top bun and a bottom bun and inbetween, some chaotic amalgam of meat, chili, nacho cheese, onions, and jalapenos strata, surely a violation of some unwritten sandwich law. It was the only sandwich they sold that they seemingly acknowledged the futility of attempting to eat out of hand–it was served in a clamshell with a fork. It was good; it was bad; it was ugly. I’d go back, but not for this.

How can I convince you that this awful-looking ugly sandwich is worth the drive to southern Minnesota? Will it help if I throw in a free trip to the SPAM museum? There’s also apparently something in Austin called Buffy the Cow but I did not care enough to visit it.

Look, do you like Big Macs? I don’t, really. I like the idea of Big Macs. I think when I was a kid who didn’t like burgers very much, the Big Mac was something that was just different enough from an ordinary burger that I started ordering them and got used to them. I’ve always been unhappy with their ratios though. Too much bread, very little meat. This is an alternate universe Big Mac remix with that ratio reversed, skewed, and knocked into next week. Lots of meat, in fact one might say it’s Extremely Meat Forward. No sesame seeds on the bun, no lettuce. Just the right amount of pickles, onions, and Thousand Island. It is a Good Sandwich.

After this lunch, we made the six hour drive home to find our power out, everything in our refrigerator and deep freeze ruined. We spent the night soaking our bedclothes in sweat without any air conditioning, and joining our neighbors in wondering when the heck ComEd was finally going to fix it. The power will have been restored to most if not all of my town by the time you’re reading this, but there are entire communities in Iowa that were devastated by the same derecho that knocked down half the trees in my town, and they need help. There are volunteer opportunities and ways to donate. Please take a look and see if there’s anything you can do to help Cedar Rapids and any other communities in Iowa devastated by last Monday’s derecho.

To end things back on a happier note, Tendermaid Hamburgers is just the kind of place that Sandwich Tribunal likes to find, and we’re happy to let you know it’s there for your next trip down I-90. It’s never going to replace Maid-Rite for me personally, but I Love–capital L Love–their Tender Island sandwich, and I haven’t even mentioned how great their malts are. Don’t forget to stop by the SPAM Museum while you’re in town. And if you go, be sure to tell Buffy the Cow that I’m sorry and I’ll try to stop by next time around.