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Dear Sliders,
It’s time to come clean. You are not a meal. You do not deserve your own restaurants in college towns, right next to the eatery that only serves cereal. (We’ll deal with you later, The Cereal Bowl.) I don’t have a problem with you as an appetizer, or when you are dressed up all fancy and served in silver platters by party caterers at Bat-Mitzvahs, and I do not even begrudge you the free PR you got from the Harold and Kumar movies. But like a celebrity who rises to fame too quickly and then becomes more over-exposed than the cast of the Jersey Shore, I fear you have begun to take yourself too seriously.
Remember your place, sliders. You are food for drunken college kids at 3 a.m. They provide the majority of your fan-base, and these are the same people who eat dry Ramen because they can’t remember how to boil water. You cost under two dollars, which is a pretty good sign that you are not a meal. If you need to buy a case of something to feed two people until they are full, then you are not dinner. You may think I’m being overly-harsh, but I feel very strongly about this: If you are legitimate enough of a food source to warrant your own restaurant, then that opens a Pandora’s Box of other noshes. Pigs-in-a-blanket delicitessans? Gourmet gastro-pubs that only serve chicken satay on a stick with peanut dipping sauce?
I understand that it’s not your fault, Hamburger sliders. You are only as popular as the culture allows you to be, and who are you to say no to all the attention lavished on you? Normal people get unnervingly excited when they see a Sliders diner, and I appreciate your effort to sober people up by making sure your restaurants are lit by 5000 watt fluorescent bulbs at 2 in the morning. Also, your tininess and affordability means a lot of choices that can all be sampled in one sitting, which you cannot do with a normal burger. But as Sheena Iyengar writes in The Art of Choosing, “The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice, and while there is something beautiful and immensely satisfying about having all of this variety at our fingertips, we also find ourselves beset by it.”
So just because you present twenty different ways to consume a tiny burger doesn’t actually make our lives any better, Sliders. Instead, you have become a symbol of America’s excess of options, and the line leading out the door of your restaurants are not a sign of your popularity, but rather the fact that after 5 pitchers of beer, nobody can make up their damn mind about what variation of finger food to consume.
I think sliders are really the solution to the excess of choices, not the source of them. I mean, think about it. Before sliders came along, there were already a billion different ways to eat a burger. The problem was, most people can only consume one burger, two tops, in a sitting without beginning to feel very sick. Enter the sliders. Roughly 1/3-1/4 the size of a normal burger, they allow you to try bacon cheddar, mushroom swiss, classic American cheese, and The Everything Burger all in one sitting, and without making yourself sick. Plus, for some of us more kitchen-savvy college kids, they’re great when you find yourself with ground beef, dinner rolls, and weird sandwich toppings in very small amounts.
I bow to your wisdom, O Inventor of the Mighty Slider. Or, as I call them at home, mini-burger.