Top Hat Burger Palace: A bite of Ventura History

Eating at Top Hat Burger Palace is like taking a bite into history. The joint has settled in the same location for more than 50 years and is listed in the historical registry.
Top Hat stands in the heart of downtown Ventura on Main Street. Even though they call the restaurant a “palace” its really no bigger than a tool shed; blink and you might miss it.
I asked the girl at the grill for a cheeseburger. She smiled cheerfully, immediately throwing the patty and the bun on the hot stove. The size of kitchen is so tiny, she could have been flipping burgers in galley of Alaskan crab fishing boat. Of course size doesn’t matter, it’s the motion of ocean or in this case the taste of the burger.
I unwrapped the burger to give it a good look before taking my initial bite. First of all the burger had jack cheese, not American or cheddar. I’m used to seeing yellow cheese smothering my burger, so seeing a white unfamiliar cheese melting down the sides of the patty made me feel frightened and insecure.
Besides putting jack cheese on burgers, Top Hat also brings of the question of mayonnaise on burgers. Some may think it’s un-American to put mayo on you’re burger. I like mayo in small doses, but this particular burger was a bit overdone. There was enough mayo in it to make potato salad for an entire Super Bowl party. In fact, with all that mayonnaise smothered on jack cheese, I couldn’t tell where the mayo ended and the cheese began.
Underneath the patty was a bedding of shredded lettuce an onions with, guess what? More mayonnaise. All that gooey white stuff just seemed to melt out of the burger like Jimmy Dorsey songs melted out of the clarinet of a nearby street musician.
I don’t want to come down hard on Top Hat because the burger has potential. It was juicy and seasoned with the taste of hundreds of thousands of burgers cooked on the same stove for over 50 years. It’s just the excessive globs of mayo exterminated the flavor of the burger with extreme prejudice. Tell the cook to hold the mayo and you have a burger worth biting into.
Besides, Top Hat holds a place in the history books. It is the scene of the first murder ever to be solved by sampling DNA.
In 1988 a man was stabbed at Top Hat. Police arrested a woman, who probably would have gotten away with it not for modern science. The murder propelled the burger restaurant from a nostalgic Ventura eatery to true-crime landmark. I don’t know what it is about a brutal restaurant slaying that attracts the masses but it works. My theory is a bloody tragedy in a restaurant makes for good dining.