Bates Burgers (Livonia)
33406 Five Mile RoadThree days in a row I had to drive to the Detroit area for work.
I was a little surprised when I got in to work on Thursday and was told we were heading to Wayne County. I was going with my co-worker from Kalamazoo this time so I didn’t have to meet anyone in Lansing like I had the previous two nights.
I, of course, was tired after a couple of long days of work knowing that this one was also going to be a long day.
I wasn’t planning on buying lunch but sometimes you pass a building and it just strikes you. You have to eat there. That happened to me as we were driving through Livonia.
We came to the intersection of Five Mile and Farmington Roads and right across from me I saw a little white building on the corner. I knew I had to stop.
Bates Burgers has been on that corner of Five Mile and Farmington in Livonia since the late 1950’s. It kind of looks like a White Castle and serves a similar menu of sliders. Everything in the building is original and it’s still owned by the Bates family. I have actually heard of this place before but had never sought it out. The fact that it was right in front of me as I was driving through Livonia was a happy accident.
The building is really small and I didn’t have a lot of time. My co-worker was at a nearby business working on some stuff. I told him I was going to sneak away and pick up lunch. As much as I wanted to go sit at the lunch counter, I put my order in online so I could just grab it and get back to where he was.
I put in an order for a Triple Cheeseburger and an order of fries. The cost was around $12 and the ordering system said it’d be ready in about 15 minutes.
The parking lot at Bates Burgers is a little confusing to get in to. I was coming from the south so you have to go past the building, find a crossover, and come back south, go into the alley and squeeze your way in to a spot.
On the backside of the building, there is an area for carry-out ordering. I headed there instead of going inside the packed restaurant.
The carry out area is just a small vestibule with a hole cut in to the wall. There were quite a few people who were coming in to order food to go. I told the woman working I had an online order. She looked it up and it wasn’t quite ready yet. She said she’d call me when it was. I was assuming a phone call but there is a speaker on the outside of the building they call out names when carry-out orders are ready. You can sit in your car or hang in the parking lot until you hear your name.
It took longer than I was hoping it would for my name to be called. Once it was, I headed back in to the vestibule and grabbed the white paper bag with my food. There are signs all over the parking lot that you can’t eat in the parking lot so I hopped in the car and headed back to where my co-worker was to eat.
I started with the fries on the way back. They were pretty standard frozen crinkle cut fries. They were pretty salty but that actually made them really good. I got the large order and that was the right call. They pretty much just filled a large drink cup with fries and overflowed it a bit so there were also some hanging around in the bottom of the bag.
I ordered the Triple Cheeseburger but when I unwrapped it, it was much smaller than I expected. When I ordered a Triple Cheeseburger, I was expecting three patties. There was only one patty on the sandwich. So is it just triple the size of a regular slider? Not really sure. The menu doesn’t say anything about what it actually is. I got the burger plain because I knew I’d be eating in the car and didn’t want to make a mess. The burger looks a little sad this way but it was still quite tasty. The burger patty, while small, had a ton of flavor with a crispiness around the edges. It comes on a sesame sed bun which gave it kind of an old timey flavor. The sandwich was really tasty but not very filling. I think I probably should have ordered the Double Double which appears to be two burger patties. Now I know for next time.
Bates Burgers is legendary in the Detroit area and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a great bit of nostalgia on the corner of Five Mile and Farmington. It’s a simple diner doing simple things but doing them really well. I had a miss with my burger only because I think I misunderstood what I was getting. I’m looking forward to a return trip to get it right.
SW Michigan Dining 