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Matt's Bar
Matt's Bar, a Minneapolis neighborhood bar operating since 1954, is one of two competing claimants — along with the nearby 5-8 Club — to having invented the Jucy Lucy, a burger with cheese stuffed inside the patty itself rather than melted on top, a genuinely distinctive regional specialty largely unique to the Twin Cities area. The restaurant deliberately spells its version "Jucy Lucy," dropping a letter from the standard spelling, specifically to distinguish its claimed-original version from the 5-8 Club's competing "Juicy Lucy," a small but pointed detail in a rivalry both bars have leaned into as part of their own marketing and local identity for decades. The molten cheese center, which requires the burger to rest briefly after cooking to avoid burning a diner's mouth on the first bite, has become such a well-known regional hazard that servers routinely warn first-time customers directly, a genuinely unusual level of built-in customer-service caution for a single menu item. Matt's Bar's combination of its contested founding claim to a genuinely distinctive regional burger format and the cheese-filled Jucy Lucy's own built-in eating hazard has made it one of the most specifically regional and culturally significant burger destinations anywhere outside the country's more nationally famous burger hubs.
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The Apple Pan
The Apple Pan opened in 1947 in West Los Angeles, and the small horseshoe-shaped counter restaurant has operated continuously under the same basic format and menu for over 75 years, with no seating beyond the counter itself and a policy that's never accepted credit cards throughout its entire history. The restaurant's Hickory Burger, topped with a tangy barbecue-style sauce, has become its signature order, served by an unusually long-tenured staff of servers, some of whom have reportedly worked at the counter for multiple decades, a level of employee continuity rare in the restaurant industry at any price point. The Apple Pan has drawn celebrity regulars for decades specifically because of its unpretentious, unchanged format, and food writers and critics have repeatedly cited it as one of the last surviving examples of a genuine mid-century Los Angeles diner counter operating essentially unchanged into the present day. The Apple Pan's combination of over 75 years of continuous, unchanged operation and its status as one of the last surviving genuine mid-century LA diner counters has made it one of the most historically significant single-location burger restaurants anywhere in the country.
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