B2A2: Sidetrack's Signature Burger
Entry five heads to Ypsilanti. A crooked building in Depot Town where GQ once told you to eat.
Five entries into B2A2, and every burger so far has been in downtown Ann Arbor. The smash burgers and the frita and the Blimpy double have all lived inside the same few square miles. Good burgers, but the series was overdue for Ypsilanti.
Sidetrack Bar & Grill sits at 56 East Cross Street in Depot Town, in a building that went up in the 1850s and got hit by a freight train in 1929. The building leans. The bar has been there under different names for the better part of 170 years. Linda French has run the current version since 1980. GQ put the burger on its list of "Twenty Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die." None of that is new information if you've read our Sidetrack profile. What is new is putting the burger up against the four contenders we've already published.
This is the fifth entry in B2A2, Best Burger in Ann Arbor. After the Raven's Club smash burger, the Frita Batidos frita, the Echelon smash burger, and Blimpy Burger, I wanted a pub burger. A real one. Not a smash burger in a cocktail bar, not a Cuban frita, not a build-your-own counter operation. A burger in a bar where the beer taps outnumber the menu pages and nobody is thinking about James Beard.
The Burger
The Sidetrack Signature Burger is $19 and made with wagyu beef. That sentence would have been strange to write a few years ago, when the patty was a more straightforward ground beef affair, but the menu has evolved. The price has gone up with it. Nineteen dollars is more than Blimpy and more than Frita Batidos, though still below Echelon's bar-menu pricing.
The patty is thick and loosely packed, cooked on the flat grill with a solid char on the exterior. This is not a smash burger. There is no lacy crust, no thin pressed patty seared to crispness. The Sidetrack burger is built vertically. The center stays pink if you ask for medium, and you should ask for medium, because the wagyu has enough fat to stay juicy through the middle rather than drying out the way a lean patty would.
It comes with lettuce, tomato, dill pickle chips, and a tangy house sauce that reminds me of a slightly sharper Thousand Island. The sauce does its job without dominating. Cheese is extra ($1.50), and you want the sharp cheddar. It has enough bite to register against the beef. American would melt cleaner but disappear into the richness.
The bun holds. That sounds minor, but after eating four other B2A2 burgers, I notice buns now. This one is sturdy enough to absorb the juice from a thick, fatty patty without going soggy, and it doesn't try to be the main character. It shows up, does the work, and gets out of the way.
The Fries
Sidetrack serves standard pub fries, and I mean that descriptively, not dismissively. They come out hot, salted, golden on the outside and soft in the middle. They are not the thick-cut wedges from Raven's Club or the hand-cut crisps from Echelon. They are the fries you picture when someone says "bar food." Eat them while they're hot. Dip them in the house sauce if you ask for extra on the side.
The Beer
Four entries into B2A2, every restaurant had a drink recommendation. Cocktails at Raven's Club and Echelon. A batido at Frita Batidos. A can of pop at Blimpy. Sidetrack's answer is beer, and the answer is good.
The tap list runs over twenty drafts, leaning Michigan craft. Jolly Pumpkin, Arbor Brewing, Bell's, Short's. The selection rotates often enough that regulars still find new pours alongside the standards. I ordered a Bell's Two Hearted, which is not an adventurous choice but is the right one next to a big, fatty burger. The bitterness cuts through the beef. The carbonation resets the palate. You don't need a cocktail program here. You need a well-kept tap line and a bartender who pours a clean pint. Sidetrack has both.
The Room
I've written about the patio before and I'll say it again: from May through October, there is no better place to eat a burger outdoors in Washtenaw County. String lights, trees, the Huron River audible if the crowd thins out.
But I went on a Tuesday in February, so I sat inside. The bar room is long and narrow, shaped partly by that 1929 train impact. The walls have accumulated decades of stickers, photos, and local ephemera. Twenty-plus taps line the bar. A couple of TVs show whatever game is on. The vibe is not curated. Nobody designed this atmosphere. It accrued over forty-plus years of people sitting on these stools and eating these burgers, and it feels like it.
This is the first B2A2 entry where the room itself is part of the argument. Echelon has a beautiful dining room, but the burger is a bar-menu item you eat at the counter. Raven's Club is designed for cocktails, not burgers. Blimpy barely has a room. Sidetrack is the only place in the series where the burger and the bar feel like they grew up together.
Where It Fits
Five entries. Five different arguments.
Raven's Club is discipline. Frita Batidos is personality. Echelon is firepower. Blimpy is democracy. Sidetrack is permanence. The burger has been here for decades. The building has been here for almost two centuries. The series needed a pub burger, and this is the pub burger.
Does it challenge Echelon for the top spot? Not on pure sear and technique. VanWagner's smash burger is still the most precisely constructed thing I've eaten in this series. But Sidetrack's burger does something Echelon's doesn't. It belongs completely to its room. You eat it at a bar that smells like beer and fryer oil, in a building that a train knocked crooked, in a town that doesn't get enough credit. The burger is thick, the beef is good, the cheddar is sharp, and the Two Hearted is cold. That's the whole pitch. It doesn't need anything else.
B2A2 is better for including Ypsilanti. This town has been feeding people longer than most of the restaurants on South Main Street have existed. Sidetrack is the proof.
This is part of our ongoing series. Read the full tracker: Best Burger in Ann Arbor (B2A2): The Running List.
Sidetrack Bar & Grill is at 56 E Cross St, Ypsilanti, MI 48198. Open Tuesday through Sunday. Closed Mondays.