Burger Trail
We first spotted the banners waving outside, the kind of thing that catches you from a moving car, that makes you slow down and say wait, what is that? What’s happening over there on the corner of South 12th and Ohio? The Construction and General Laborers Local 324 building, which you’ve driven past a dozen times without thinking much about it, had become something else. Or was becoming something else. The banners said so.
"Lo vimos en TikTok." And they came. Golden State Kitchen Bagels and Burgers' small space inside the union hall at 101 South 12th Street was packed, with people filling it, and more lining up out the door; people standing across the street just taking in the whole scene. Word had traveled the way word travels now, and it had landed, and here everyone was.
It’s not far from Frosty King, which puts you on the other side of the glass, which conducts its business through a window, which carries the particular energy of a place that has been exactly what it is for a very long time and has no intention of changing. There’s a throwback quality to standing at that window that connects you to some earlier version of the neighborhood, its nickname that is less a current description and more a relic of how people remember that corner.
On the Richmond Burger Trail: Frosty King keeps it satisfying on Harbour Way South
There’s no mistaking Frosty King on Harbour Way South. The building itself is a throwback, trimmed in fire-engine red and sun-bright yellow, with the kind of bold mid-century angles that seem built for hamburgers and milkshakes. Our quest continues as we methodically devour Richmond’s burger scene one establishment at a
Soren Hemmila
But something has shifted. And Golden State Kitchen is the proof of it.
No glass. No window. No transaction conducted at arm’s length. Just a line of families and teenagers and workers standing together in a corner of an old union hall on South 12th Street, everybody mixed in together, waiting for their order. The flat-top is right there. The people making your food are right there. The fact that you can stand in this room without a barrier between you and the person handing you your burger is not a small thing. It is not a small thing at all.
The buns are baked fresh every day, and then they hit the grill and come up with this crunch to them, this particular crunch that you weren’t expecting, and that makes you stop mid-bite and recalibrate everything you thought you knew about what a bun was supposed to contribute to the overall situation. He smashes the burger balls down on the flat-top, but don’t go calling them smash burgers, that’s not quite the right word for what’s happening here. It’s more considered than that. More deliberate. Lettuce, tomato, red onion, sauce. The classics, arranged with the confidence of someone who understands that the classics became classics for a reason and doesn’t feel the need to complicate that.
It lives somewhere between In-N-Out Burgers and Nations. Bigger than In-N-Out. That same clean, honest, west coast sensibility in the taste, that same sense that someone made a decision about what a burger should be and has been faithful to it ever since, but with more weight to it, more presence, more of a sense that you are eating something that was made for you specifically, right now, in this moment, in this union hall on this corner.
The fries have that same energy, too. Tremendous out of the gate, bright and confident, and then they settle into themselves as fries sometimes do, which is fine, because by then you are mostly focused on the burger anyway, and the fries have already done their most important work.
A single cheeseburger and fries cost $11.80.
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