Description: Mon-Fri 11am-7pm
Sat. 11am-4pm
Closed Sunday :
Dick Fergen is my kind of guy. Dick left a job in farm management in
Texas to return to his home town of Brookings, SD. Upon his arrival,
he inquired about the landmark burger joint Nick’s and soon
thereafter purchased it from the notorious and sometimes volatile
third owner Duane Larson.
I watched Dick at the grill for one and a half hours, waiting
patiently to speak to him. He was in a zone, pressing small balls of
ground round into a puddle of bubbling grease, transferring them to
buns and serving them at a rate of about seven hundred per hour. When
I finally got his attention, he was taking a break and eating, not
surprisingly, a burger. “I eat mine dry,” he said. This meant he had
squeezed some of the grease out, “Makes it a little bit healthier.”
Dick doesn’t really look like your typical hamburger stand owner. He
is a sixty-something impossibly fit, tanned, self-described Harley
nut. What brought him to and keeps him at Nick’s is pure nostalgia.
Amazingly, Dick creates his own “solution” for the deep-frying of his
burgers. This is not just any old grease. He starts with solids and
adds seasoning according to a recipe that has been handed down for
decades.
Orders are not taken they are yelled. “We just holler at Dick what we
need,” Laurie said. First, you tell the counter person what you want.
When your burgers are ready you tell them what you want on them. They
arrive at your counter spot on a square of wax paper and can be
consumed at a rate of roughly one every twenty seconds, which is good
because you will need to make room for the thirty people waiting for
your stool.
A man named Stewart sitting to my left told me he had been coming
back to Nick’s every time he visited his alma mater, South Dakota
State University. “I’ve been coming ever since I graduated in
’52.”Old timers refer to their visits as getting their “Nick’s fix.”
“If you are not from South Dakota, then you wouldn’t understand.”
Dick pondered seriously while gazing at the ceiling, “There’s
something about these people. I wouldn’t trade them for anyone in the
world.”
source: www.hamburgeramerica.com