Josh's Food Blog: White Manna road trip

Driving back from NY the Sunday after Thanksgiving has its ups and downs (mostly downs) however the bright side of the rain filled 12 hour, normally 6 hour drive is White Manna. Located in Hackensack NJ about 5 minutes from the Ikea, the drive down from NY wasn't too bad, it took us about an hour and a half. It was raining and cold when we arrived, and the line was out the door. I stood there with the SLR waiting to get inside, Liz was freezing and Adam wanted to listen to the football game. I gave Adam the keys to the car and he went off to watch the cat and listen to the game. Liz and I waited our turn to be called into the restaurant to place our order. Liz started off saying "I want 6 cheeseburgers, 3 without onion and then 3 with, and then I want 3 more cheeseburg" She got cut off by the guy behind the counter. He asked her how many total burgers do we want. After a little math we decided 11 should be fine. I personally wanted 6, 3 without onion, 3 with to decide. After we ordered another person asked if we wanted fries and a drink, fries are amazingly good here, but this place is all about the burger or slider in this case. The bun is a potato roll like you would normally have at the dinner table. The bun is placed on top of the burger while it is cooking to seep in the flavor of the onion (if you ordered it that way) and the cheese. It is steamed basically. The sliders themselves are little meatballs that are pressed onto the grill, they grill up amazingly fast, which is a good thing because people usually order 5 or more each. The restaurant is amazingly small, maybe 20 or so stools to sit and eat, and they ring the grill in a horseshoe pattern, there were about 40 people in the restaurant when I was there and every seat was taken and there was no room to move. It was perfect if it wasn't raining and I didn't have to drive 12 hours but this really did make up for it. These burgers are cooked perfectly, the cheese is melted into the onions and then the bun is pressed into everything. Number 2 burger on the list.