T/A's Buffalo Burger w/ seasoned fries

Curse me for not taking my camera in with me yesterday for this!

TravelCenters of America, loving referred to as T/A by me, has a new special menu this month. The offerings are...interesting. One side of the special insert are burgers, the flip side are the same items but with chicken. I guess logic being if one side doesn't sound good with ground beef, flip it over and hey, that sounds better with chicken! Or something. I've been avoiding this menu like the plague ever since I first laid eyes on it. Nothing about it sounded appealing. The most confusing item in my mind is a burger (or you can get it with chicken!) with pickled onions on top. I've seen pickled items on the buffet a few places and it just doesn't sound good at all..which means for the interest of this blog I'm going to have to try it.

Yesterday, however, I tried the Buffalo Burger. I think that's what it was called. Of course the T/A website doesn't list anything about their restaurant specials nor do they have pictures so this is going to be pretty boring. It's a ground beef patty (or you can have it with chicken!) coated in Frank's Red Hot seasoning, grilled, then served with lettuce, tomato, pickle (hold the pickle, please), cheese and a blue cheese dressing on a regular bun. It comes with fries that are also seasoned with Frank's Red Hot seasoning.

The first thing I noticed when I bit into this burger was...wow...this has no flavoring to it at all. Did the cook forget to put it on? Did it all cook off with the grease? Dude, where's my red hot seasoning?! Everything else was there so I'm guessing it was made correctly but there was no flavor in that burger of anything remotely close to hot or even a slight tinge. The seasoning was on the fries, so I tried a few of the fries to see how the seasoning was. After just one, yes, this seasoning does have some zing to it and it's completely noticeable so I'm really surprised it wasn't on the burger. My two theories are: it cooked off while grilling the burger or like when you season ground beef prior to grilling it, you just don't taste it after the meat is cooked.

It's not like my expectations were high anyway, I just wasn't sure what I'd expect out of this.