Why Oklahoma Onion Burgers Exist: The 1922 El Reno Railroad Strike
Published
The Oklahoma onion burger is one of the very few famous American foods whose origin story is not a myth. It has a town, a decade, a restaurant, two named people, and a specific economic reason for existing. That reason was a strike.
El Reno, Oklahoma, 1922
In the summer of 1922, roughly 400,000 railroad shopmen across the United States walked off the job in what became known as the Great Railroad Strike of 1922. It was one of the largest labour actions in American history.
El Reno, Oklahoma was a railroad town. When the shopmen struck, a large share of the town’s working population was suddenly out of wages and eating on almost nothing.
At a restaurant called the Hamburger Inn, near the intersection of what would become Route 66 and U.S. Route 81, a father and son named Homer and Ross Davis were trying to sell hamburgers to people who could not afford hamburgers. Beef was the expensive part. Onions were not.
So they used less beef and more onion. They took a small ball of ground beef, buried it in a pile of paper thin sliced yellow onion on the hot griddle, and pressed the whole thing down hard until the onions were driven into the meat and the two cooked as one patty.
They sold it for five cents and called it the Depression Burger.
The name is off by about a decade
That name has confused people ever since, because the Great Depression did not start until 1929. The burger came seven years earlier, out of a strike rather than a crash. It simply happened to be perfectly suited to the decade that followed, which is why it spread across western Oklahoma through the 1930s and stuck.
The cost logic is the whole design. A traditional onion burger is close to half onion by volume. In 1922 that made it cheap. What nobody seems to have planned is that it also made it better.
Why the cheap version tastes better
This is the part we find genuinely great about this burger. Every constraint that made it cheap also improved it.
The onions release water. Pressed against the griddle under a patty, they steam and fry at the same time, and that moisture keeps a very thin patty from drying out. A four ounce smash patty with nothing under it goes dry fast. One pressed into onions does not.
The sugars caramelize into the crust. Onion sugar hitting hot steel browns hard and fuses to the meat. You are not getting onion flavour sitting on a burger, you are getting it inside the crust of the patty.
More surface area. Pressing hard to bury the onions is also what creates the wide, thin, lacy edged patty and the Maillard crust that people now pay a premium for.
The Davises were not chasing crust. They were trying to make forty cents of beef feed more people. The technique that did that turned out to be the technique that makes the best burger.
From El Reno to everywhere
For most of a century the onion burger stayed a western Oklahoma regional dish, barely known outside the state. That changed in the 2010s, largely through the work of food historian George Motz, whose writing and filming on American regional burgers put it in front of a national audience for the first time. From there it moved into the wider smash burger boom.
El Reno still holds a Fried Onion Burger Day festival every year on the first Saturday in May. The Hamburger Inn itself is long gone.
And then it got to Toronto
Our founder, Sameer Vahidy, ate one in Oklahoma City and could not find anything like it in Ontario. We opened in 2022 as a single stall inside Kingsbridge Food Hall in Mississauga, exactly one hundred years after Homer and Ross Davis started pressing onions into beef in El Reno.
We now run four locations across Toronto and Mississauga, and the burger is still built the same way it was in 1922. Thin patty, thin onions, heavy press, hot griddle. We add American cheese, pickles and burger sauce, which is the modern convention rather than the 1922 original.
If you want the technical difference between this and a standard smash burger, we lay it out in What are Oklahoma Burgers. If you want to see where it sits among other American regional burgers, we covered those here. And if you want to try pressing one yourself, our smashing methods post covers the techniques.