Behold the Squeezeburger!

Yes, what you see before you is in fact a cheeseburger. And yes, underneath that curtain of fried cheddar is a full 1/3 lb. of juicy meat. On a trip to San Francisco last weekend, Seattlest made a jaunt up to Napa solely to wrap our hands around one of these babies. Sure, we stopped in Sonoma for some wine too, but this burger was the road trip's raison d'etre.

Eating a Squeezeburger was a long time in the making. It all started a few months ago, when we came across a Food Network show on the best burgers in the country featuring the Squeeze Inn in Sacramento. Since we love cheese, one look at that monstrous cheese skirt and we had to have one. Some rudimentary googling indicated that while the original Squeeze Inn has been at its current location for twenty years, in 2007 owner Travis Hausauer made plans to add two additional restaurants: one in Galt, and one in Napa, just a stone's throw from SF. And thus the burger-fueled road trip was born.

Unlike the tiny, funky Sacramento location, Napa's Squeeze Inn is located in a non-descript mini-mall right off California Highway 29. We were there mid-afternoon, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. The employees were friendly, and the owner chatted with us as we snapped myriad photos of the burgering process.

And just how was the burger? The cheesiest. A Squeezeburger starts off as a ground beef patty grilled on the flat-top, turned once or twice. Then it's smothered in shredded cheddar and a sourdough bun is placed atop the melty mess. The cook tosses a few ice cubes on the grill, and the whole thing (burger, cheese, bun) is covered for a couple minutes, until the bun is steamed and the cheese is nice and crispy. Then you eat. Our companion complained that his burger had too much mustard, but we like ours saucy. We began by peeling some of the extra cheese from around the edges and eating that alone, before diving right into the burger proper--we didn't stop till it was all gone. And that's how we conquered the Squeezeburger, a most magnificent burger beast.

Yes, there is a burger under all that cheese.

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