
- Julia Clancy
- $8 cheddar cheeseburger at Worthy Burger
To be sure, one of the finest things about summer is a heavy, ripe tomato sliced and slicked in olive oil — the heel reserved for coarse salt and eaten in three bites over the sink. Yet there comes a time when I’m hit with a meat craving that halts me mid-stride. Red meat, specifically. A thick, stacked, pub-style cheeseburger. Eaten outside with a beer so cold it hurts my teeth, which is only the proper temperature for beer when it's 90 degrees outside with 85 percent humidity.
That’s how I ended up on the shaded patio at Worthy Burger last weekend.
After perusing a swoon-worthy draft list stocked with rotating local gems — such as Hill Farmstead, Burlington Beer Company, Zero Gravity and Tunbridge’s recently opened Upper Pass Beer Co. — I tucked into a cheddar cheeseburger and a draft of Swamp Monster in Love, newcomer River Roost’s crisp, biting pale ale. The patty was fat and gloriously funky from its former life as a grass-grazing cow from the town next door. It was grilled to a blushing medium rare by the wood fire crackling in Worthy’s open kitchen, and trimmed with Plymouth cheddar, lettuce, red onion and a slab of tomato.
At only $8 ($7 without the cheese) for a wood-grilled, locally raised and grass-fed cheeseburger with quality accoutrements, this burger quelled my animal-meat craving without eating my wallet in the process. My date and I also split an order of beef-tallow fries and a zippy, perfectly acidic plate of housemade pickles for less than $4 each, which still kept me at my $12 budget.
Nestled in a renovated railway house along South Royalton's train tracks, Worthy Burger is a proper name for such a sterling pitstop. Bonus note: Next door's South Royalton Market has a freezer full of ice cream sandwiches and hard-to-find growler fills from three rotating taps.

- Julia Clancy
- At Worthy Burger in South Royalton
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