
Miner-Dunn is one of those places I've been meaning to get to since reading, I believe, a post by Vital Info on some other food board in about 2002. (Can't seem to find it there, who knows.) It's on such a stretch of great burger places, which happens to be so far away and not near anything I regularly visit, that it took me till now. It shouldn't have.
It's a homey place, screaming unchanged from the 60s at least, not least because of the cigarette smoke in the air. Alas, the device on the ceiling that would light up and ding a table's number when their order was up was no longer in operation.

What did we have? What do you think we had, at a place touting a real burger, handmade from freshly ground meat? I examined it carefully... right kind of bun, soft and not too bready, nice crispy lace-edge patty... I bit in, good beefy flavor, properly salted... but there was one downside.

"Everything" at Miner-Dunn is ketchup, mustard, chopped (actually minced, possibly reconstituted dried) onion, and relish. And the relish and the onion are both so wet that they dampen the bun pretty quickly. (I also think the reconstituted onions, if they are, gave it a slightly funny taste.) Eating without first taking a bunch of pictures might be one solution, but there's another choice on the menu-- you can request onion slices, rather than the chopped onions. It's pretty easy to surmise that they've recognized the soggy bun problem, feel they can't take away the old school dried onions and relish because people who've been eating them that way for 60 years would complain, but offer an alternative which is surely the better way to go. Next time, it'll be the sliced onions and no relish for me.
Fresh-cut fries were great, my dining companions enjoyed the sherbert that ended the meal. I should be back in less than five or six years, really I should.