I don’t remember when or with whom I first visited the Cotton Bottom Inn, a divey little bar hidden in a woodsy, upscale corner of the Salt Lake Valley not far from the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, but I’m certain I started hearing about the place’s legendary garlic burgers while I was still in high school.

The Cotton Bottom’s garlic burger is quite possibly one of the most perfect gustatory creations in the history of cooked food, the ultimate, inevitable expression of an evolutionary process that began the day a tribe of our Cro Magnon ancestors accidentally dropped a mastodon haunch into their campfire and discovered that, hey, that meat stuff tastes a lot better warm and smokey-flavored than raw and drippy.

If you’ve never had one, the garlic burger is exactly what it sounds like, a man-sized hunk of ground beef mixed with chopped bits of fresh garlic, grilled to juicy perfection by a guy who probably has a criminal record, and served on a hunk of wonderfully chewy French bread with all the traditional fixins. Cheese is extra, and worth it.

To be honest, the garlic-to-burger ratio is sometimes a little inconsistent. I’ve been there on nights when you can hardly detect the stuff, and on other occasions it’s so thick it completely overwhelms any other flavor you might experience for the next week or so. But on the nights when the mixture is correct, one of those warm and breezy nights when you get lucky and find a table on the patio and there’s a cute biker chick in a leather halter-top nearby who doesn’t seem to mind your admiring glances, and you’re there with your mates and you’ve got a pitcher of cold Coors to wash down your dinner… ah, those nights are truly one of the great pleasures of this — or any other — lifetime.

It seems like pretty much everyone in these parts knows about those wonderful burgers, but of course the Cotton Bottom is just what I said up front, a tiny and mildly seedy hole-in-the-wall with no ambitions to be anything other than a friendly neighborhood tavern and a local treasure. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a blog entry written by a fellow named Lane, a former Salt Laker who now lives in Manhattan, in which he claims to have dined at “this trendy place called Bubby’s, in Tribeca,” whose menu offers — get this — “The Garlic Burger: our version of the Cotton Bottom’s classic.”

How incredibly unlikely is that? This fancy-schmancy New York place couldn’t possibly be copying our Cotton Bottom, could it? Well, yes, it could, according to Lane:

…the Bubby’s waitress confirmed [it]: the chef had lived in Utah or skied in Utah or something, and this $15 burger was in fact modeled after that of my hometown dive bar.

For further confirmation, I googled around for the menu. It’s there, all right. Just scroll down to the burger section.
Now, we Utahns admittedly do tend to have something of an inferiority complex just as Lane suggests, a certainty that we are the uncoolest, least well-regarded, and most misunderstood people in the country. The joke runs that we finally get the fads here about five years after everybody else abandons them as hopelessly square. Intellectually, I know that’s not quite true, certainly not these days anyway. Utah — the Salt Lake area especially — has come a long way from the Waltons-style pressed-jeans-and-long-sleeved-shirts-in-summer look that I recall a lot of older men wearing in my younger days. But still… the thought of a trendy eatery outside the Zion Curtain — one in New York of all places — aping one of our local delicacies… well, I’m simply astounded.

Brian, if you’re reading this, you’ve got to run down to Tribeca and try this. I know you’ve never experienced the Cotton Bottom original, but let me know what you think anyway, will you?