🍔 A Fictional Historical Interview with Theodore “Ted” Duberek
Travel in Time with Dan | Ted’s Restaurant, Meriden, Connecticut
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. Ted’s Restaurant in Meriden, Connecticut is a real place and has been serving its famous steamed cheeseburgers since 1959. Theodore “Ted” Duberek is the name of the founder of America’s 1st steamed cheeseburger, and the subject of this creative tribute. The historical facts about Ted’s, the steamed cheeseburger, and Connecticut’s burger history are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, written to honor the legacy of this beloved Connecticut institution.
📍 Setting: Ted’s Restaurant, Meriden, Connecticut — early 1960s
The smell hits me before I even open the door. Something warm and savory and completely unlike anything coming out of the burger joints springing up along every highway in America. Inside, Ted’s is small — wonderfully, stubbornly small. A counter, a few stools, the hiss of steam rising in the air. The place is packed with factory workers still in their work clothes, eating fast, and talking loud. Behind the counter, a compact, energetic man with a white apron and flour-dusted forearms moves with the efficiency of someone who has never wasted a single motion in his life. He spots me, holds up one finger… just a minute, slides two steaming burgers onto plates, calls out two names, and then turns to me with a grin that suggests he finds life genuinely enjoyable.
Dan: Ted! Thank you for squeezing me in. This place is absolutely hopping.
Ted: (wiping his hands on his apron and leaning against the counter) Hopping is good. Quiet is bad. Quiet means something’s wrong with the food, and nothing is wrong with my food. You want a burger while we talk?
Dan: I absolutely do.
Ted: (already moving) Good answer. You can’t interview a man about his burger without eating one. That’s just common sense.
Dan: Ted, let’s start at the beginning. How did Ted’s come to be?
Ted: (loading meat into the steaming tray with practiced ease) I grew up in Meriden. Watched my father work in the factories, watched my uncles work in the factories. This city ran on factory workers… silverware, tools, and hardware. Meriden was making things that ended up all over the world. And all those workers needed to eat. Fast, cheap, good. Three things that are very hard to do all at once.
I’d been cooking my whole life, loved it, and I knew this city needed a place that was serious about the food without being fancy about it. So in 1959, I opened up right here. Small on purpose. I wanted to do one thing and do it better than anybody.
Dan: And that one thing was the steamed cheeseburger.
Ted: (pointing the spatula at me) That one thing was the steamed cheeseburger. Now, everybody else at the time was grilling. Grilling was what you did. You slapped a patty on a hot surface, you pressed it down, grease went everywhere, and you ended up with something flat and a little charred around the edges. Fine. People ate it. But I kept thinking that there has to be a better way.
Dan: Where did the idea for steaming come from?
Ted: (pausing, a fond look crossing his face) Honestly? My mother. She steamed everything. Vegetables, fish, you name it. She always said the same thing, “Theodore, when you steam something, you keep what matters, and you let go of what doesn’t.” She was talking about cooking. But she was also, I think, talking about life. (laughs)
I started experimenting. Put the meat in a steel container, let the steam do the work. The fat and the grease — gone. What’s left is the pure flavor of the meat itself, tender, juicy, nothing burnt, nothing pressed flat. Then the cheese… I melt it separately in its own container so it comes out like velvet. You put those two things together, and it’s — (kisses his fingers) — it’s something different. It’s something nobody else was doing.
Dan: When you first opened, did people immediately get it? Or did it take time to win them over?
Ted: (laughing heartily) Oh, some of them looked at me like I had lost my mind. “You’re going to steam a burger? Like a vegetable?” Yes. Like a vegetable. Trust me. And once they tasted it… once that first bite happened… I never had to argue with anyone twice. The burger made the argument for itself.
The factory workers were my first believers. They’d come in after a long shift, exhausted, hungry, and they didn’t want anything complicated. They wanted something real and satisfying. The steamed burger was exactly that. Word spread fast in a factory. One man tells ten men at his machine. Ten men come in. Those ten men tell their families. Before long, I was staying open until four in the morning because the late shift needed somewhere to go after work.
Dan: Four in the morning! This place never slept.
Ted: (proudly) Not in those early years. Meriden was a city that worked around the clock, so Ted’s worked around the clock. You serve the community you’re in. That’s not a complicated philosophy. It’s just paying attention.
Dan: There’s some debate about the history of the steamed burger. Some people point to Jack’s Lunch in Middletown in the 1930s. How do you think about that?
Ted: (nodding, fair-minded about it) I’ve heard about Jack’s. And I’ll say this, I respect anyone who was experimenting with food and trying something new. But from everything I understand, what they were doing was closer to steaming ham steaks than what I’d call a true hamburger patty prepared this way. The process I developed, the steel containers, the way the cheese is handled separately, that’s specific. That’s a system I built from scratch.
But honestly? I’m not in the business of arguing about credit. I’m in the business of making burgers. The proof is right here. (gestures around the packed restaurant) Sixty-some years, and people are still lining up. That’s the only argument that matters to me.
Dan: Connecticut has an extraordinary burger history overall. Louis’ Lunch in New Haven is credited with the first hamburger sandwich in American history, back in 1895. Did you feel like you were part of a larger Connecticut food tradition?
Ted: (eyes lighting up) Absolutely. Connecticut doesn’t get enough credit for this. People think hamburgers started in some big city somewhere, or they think it was always fast food chains. But the real innovation happened in small places. A lunch counter in New Haven. A little spot in Meriden. People who were just trying to feed their neighbors something good ended up changing how everybody eats.
I felt that connection. When I was developing the steamed burger, I wasn’t thinking about competing with McDonald’s. I was thinking about doing something that Meriden would be proud of, that Connecticut would be proud of. Something that fit this place and these people.
Dan: Speaking of McDonald’s, the Taylor’s place on the Berlin Turnpike, just a few miles from here, had the second most famous McDonald’s in the entire country in the 1950s. You were operating in that shadow. Did the rise of fast food concern you?
Ted: (leaning forward) Here is what I understood that maybe not everyone understood at the time. McDonald’s is McDonald’s. You know exactly what you’re getting, every single time, anywhere in the country. That is their genius, and I genuinely respect it. But Ted’s is Ted’s. You come here for something you cannot get anywhere else on earth. Those are two completely different things, and they don’t actually compete with each other.
The moment I tried to be a cheaper, faster version of what they were doing, I would lose. I could never out-McDonald’s McDonald’s. But nobody — nobody — can out-Ted’s Ted’s. So I stopped worrying about them and focused entirely on being the best possible version of what I already was.
Dan: That’s essentially what business schools now call a Blue Ocean Strategy. It’s creating your own market space rather than competing in someone else’s.
Ted: (raising an eyebrow with a grin) Business schools have a name for it now? Good. I just called it common sense. If everybody’s fishing in the same pond, find a different pond. Or better yet, figure out that you’ve been sitting next to a lake the whole time and nobody else noticed it yet.
The steamed burger was my lake. Nobody else was there. So I set up on the shore, and I’ve been there ever since.
Dan: Ted’s, the restaurant has been featured on television: Man v. Food and others. The Hartford Yard Goats baseball team once changed their name to the Hartford Steamed Burgers for a day as a tribute. Magazines call you the best burger in Connecticut. How do you process that kind of recognition?
Ted: (genuinely moved but trying not to show it too much) You know what I think about when I hear all that? I think about the guy on the second shift at the silver factory who came in here at two in the morning in 1962 with sore feet and an empty stomach, and he sat down at that counter and ate a steamed cheeseburger and went home feeling like a human being again.
That’s what this place was built for. The television shows are wonderful. The magazine articles are wonderful. But the reason this place has lasted is because of the people who needed it and found it, and kept coming back. Recognition is nice. Being needed is better.
Dan: What do you want people to feel when they walk through that door?
Ted: (simply, without hesitation) That somebody cared. About the food, yes… but also about them. I didn’t build this place to get rich. I built it because Meriden deserved a place that took the simple act of feeding people seriously. A good meal at the end of a hard day is not a small thing. It’s a gesture that says you matter, your hunger matters, you deserve something made with care.
That’s what I want every person who walks in here to feel. Somebody cared enough to do this right.
Dan: Last question, Ted. Decades from now, long after you’re gone, what do you hope Ted’s represents to the people of Connecticut?
Ted: (looking around his small, steaming, wonderful restaurant with quiet satisfaction)
I hope it represents the idea that you don’t have to be the biggest or the loudest or the most expensive to matter. I hope it tells people that if you find the thing you do differently and you do it with complete dedication every single day, you build something that lasts.
Small can be great. Simple can be extraordinary. Different — truly, genuinely different — beats better-than-average every single time.
(He slides a steaming cheeseburger across the counter toward me)
Now stop asking questions and eat your burger before it gets cold.
I ate the burger. And I understood immediately why people had been coming back for over sixty years.
There is nothing complicated about Ted’s. A small room, a counter, the hiss of steam, and a cheeseburger unlike anything else on earth. No gimmicks, no rebranding, no pivot to whatever was trending. Just one man’s idea, executed with complete conviction, day after day, decade after decade.
The Blue Ocean Strategy. Common sense. A mother’s advice about letting go of what doesn’t matter.
Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is simply find your own lane — and then refuse to leave it. 🍔
Travel in Time with Dan is where travel, history, and leadership come together. Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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