Best Eats - June 2011

Green-Chile Cheeseburger

Sparky’s Burgers, Barbecue & Expresso, Hatch

Ronald McDonald is a fixture. A&W’s Mama and Papa Burger are on the premises, too. Even Col. Sanders eschews his 11 herbs and spices to hang out here. No, this isn’t a retirement home for fast-food restaurant mascots. It’s Sparky’s Burgers, Barbecue & Espresso, adorned with examples of the campy, oversize, iconic statues of fiberglass and concrete that were common sights along America’s highways and byways in the 1950s and ’60s. These days, they spend their free time at this local joint on the main drag of Hatch (population 1,167), 41 miles north of Las Cruces off I-25.

Although it’s the terrific barbecue and green-chile cheeseburgers that keep people coming back, the star of this kitschy roadside whimsy is, of course, the restaurant’s namesake, Sparky himself: a bucketful of bolts, gears, and sprockets fashioned into an unearthly robot (perhaps a Roswell transplant?). In the years since the restaurant’s launch, Sparky and friends have received extensive media coverage.

In New Mexico, green-chile cheeseburgers are sacrosanct, a state treasure we cherish and celebrate unlike any other food. Sparky’s version is among the very best, and not only because, being in Hatch, the chile capital of New Mexico, you can walk to the fields in which your burger’s green chile was grown.

At Sparky’s, a green-chile cheeseburger is just that: a behemoth of beef blanketed with molten cheese and fiery green chile—and nothing else. Sure, you can add mustard or ketchup, but to do so would be to desecrate the green-chile cheeseburger of the gods.

$3.99; 115 Franklin St., (575) 267-4222, www.sparkysburgers.com—Gil Garduño

To discover more outstanding restaurants, cafés, drive-ins, and joints that serve this New Mexico specialty, travel the state’s Green-Chile Cheeseburger Trail.  For info: www.newmexico.org/greenchilecheeseburger