http://burgerdays.com

In 2009, we first set out on our greasy quest to explore the Washington, D.C. landscape in a never-ending search for the area's best burger. In those nascent Burger Days years, the better-burger trend was still just emerging. There was no Shake Shack. There was no Bobby's Burger Palace. Ray's had been open less than a year. And the beefy waters of D.C. were still relatively uncharted. Sure, D.C.'s mainstream food media did a fine job writing about the big guys, but smaller, lesser-known joints were overlooked and ignored. In fact, our first-ever post was a minor rant directed toward Washingtonian's weak attempt to capitalize on March Madness with a pretty terrible Burger Bracket. To give you an idea of just how far the D.C.-area burger scene has come since then, in Washingtonian's 2009 bracket they included Fuddrucker's as one of their 16 burgers. (To be fair, they're not the only "BIG" D.C. food media that has drawn our ire with sub-par burger coverage-- we've blasted both City Paper and Zagat as well.) The thing is, you're not going to find the best burger around from a press release. You've got to be willing to go out, get your hands greasy and eat a shit-ton of burgers. And that's what we do. Five years after the start of this blog, we've yet to put a dent in our To-Do Burger List and, exactly opposite our life-expectancy, the List has only gotten longer. Don't get us wrong-- we love plenty of D.C.'s mainstream burger joints but nothing beats the experience of sitting at the sticky bar of a dingy, booze-soaked basement dive somewhere in the District with the perfect combination of beef-and-bun on a plate in front of you. Nothing. In that first Burger Days post published on March 3, 2009, we wrote what has now become our mission statement: "[T]he dives, those hole-in-the-wall spots that don’t get a passing glance from most, but still manage to churn out tasty fare, they deserve some love too. Hopefully, this blog will give people a more complete look at the D.C. burger picture, and not just the easy snapshots the Post and Washingtonian insist on offering up." Five years later, our mission continues...