GCS Ballpark in Sauget, Ill. – home of the Gateway Grizzlies minor-league baseball team – has become a mecca for road-food pilgrims, and that tradition continues this spring.
It all started in 2004, with Baseball’s Best Hot Dog. The all-Angus-beef frank is topped with bacon, sautéed onions and sauerkraut, and Cheddar sauce. Folks went gaga for the odd combo, and subsequent years introduced the Swiss Brat (a bratwurst with Swiss cheese and sautéed kraut); Baseball’s Best Nachos (tricolor tortilla chips topped with seasoned Philly beefsteak, flame-roasted onions and peppers, and Monterey Jack sauce); and the infamous Baseball’s Best Burger (a bacon cheeseburger between two halves of a Krispy Kreme doughnut).
The 2010 season, starting in May, will debut the latest snack-bar wonder: the Beast. The ballpark will offer 15 hamburger patties – that’s 5 pounds of American beef, baby – stacked on a single 3.5-foot skewer. The burgers will be marinated in Andria’s Brush-On Steak Sauce, dressed in bacon and pepper jack cheese, and secured (as much as possible, anyway) by rolls.
Grizzlies media-relations director Jeff O’Neill explained that the Beast will be sold mainly as part of group-package deals, but that the general public can try it a couple of different ways, too. They can call two days before a game to reserve one of the imposing towers of meat, or they can saunter to the snack bar and order the accurately named One-Fifteenth of the Beast, a single burger. (As it turns out, one-fifteenth, not 666, is apparently the actual “Number of the Beast.”)
“Each year is like a quest to come up with something new and unique for the ballpark,” said O’Neill. “People come here not just for the baseball, but specifically to try a bacon cheeseburger on a Krispy Kreme doughnut.”
– Byron Kerman
This article appears in Jan 1-31, 2010.