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UPDATE: 'Personal problems' for Stanich's owner include strangling ex-wife, reckless driving, records show

What responsibility does a food writer have to a restaurant they recommend? What if that recommendation ends up altering the very thing they loved about the place? What if the restaurant ends up closing?

Those are the questions at the heart of a

on the ongoing closure at Stanich’s, the beloved Northeast Portland burger bar.

Last year, after criss-crossing the country eating more than 300 burgers to name America’s best, Thrillist national writer-at-large and burger critic Kevin Alexander landed on a surprise pick at No. 1. Not the burger at Raoul’s in New York. Not the burger at Mott Street in Chicago. Instead,

. “This burger at an old mom-and-pop sports bar that's been sitting in a random Oregon neighborhood since 1949 is the best burger in America,” Alexander wrote. "This burger is a national treasure.”

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I liked Stanich’s burgers, though clearly not as much as Alexander, an opinion I probably based, in hindsight, a bit too much on how much I disliked the soggy, bitter potato sticks they called fries. But I did love Stanich’s the restaurant. It was one of the first places I ate after moving to Portland in 2006. I can still remember drinking inconceivably cheap light beer, playing tabletop video games and riding my bike home too fast down the steep hill just west on Fremont Street.

When I went back in the months after the 2017 ranking came out, the best-of article had clearly overwhelmed the restaurant. Waits were often 45 minutes or more for a simple cheeseburger, even when the restaurant was empty. The

were not kind. Six months later, Stanich’s closed, supposedly for a post-rush reset and a county-mandated deep clean. But as the days turned into weeks, it seemed the closure might be more than temporary. In a January interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Steve Stanich, the restaurant’s second-generation owner, came clean: The burger award was had been a “curse,” he told me. “It's been the worst thing that's ever happened to us.”

In Friday’s story, Alexander writes about the dread he felt returning to Portland to meet with Stanich at his cluttered office behind the restaurant. The closure, he writes, had “haunted” him. On a previous trip, a Lyft driver mentioned that someone “from California” had “ruined” Stanich’s. A Clyde Common bartender asked if he “planned on closing any more burger restaurants” while he was in town. “I feel like I’ve done a bad thing,” he writes.

Stanich tells Alexander he sees two ways out: “he can either partner with another restaurant operator to open it back up, or he can franchise.” Neither seems particularly likely, though Stanich has apparently kept the restaurant clean and running, just in case. “No matter what happens,” Alexander writes, “in all likelihood, the Stanich’s that had been open since 1949, the Stanich’s that I fell in love with, then clumsily broke like Lennie with the rabbit in Of Mice and Men, will never be the same again.”

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If there’s any irony here, given the nefarious role best-of lists and list culture in general seemed to play in Stanich’s closure, it’s that a best-of burger list helped make Stanich’s what it was in the first place. If you search through The Oregonian’s archives, you’ll find various reviews that mention Stanich’s “World’s Greatest Hamburger,” including at least one expressing skepticism about the claim. As it happens, that title actually references an accolade given by this very newspaper not long after Gladys and George Stanich opened the restaurant in 1949. In its pomp, Stanich’s would flip as many as 9,000 burgers a month on its seasoned flat-top grill, including a reported 2,000 in a single day on its 50th anniversary. The restaurant was ready for big crowds. Until they weren’t.

(While we’re handing out mea culpas, I should admit to feeling some guilt myself. When I was breaking the news that Stanich’s had closed, and wasn’t likely to reopen soon, I thought about calling Alexander to give him the heads up, but didn’t. I know how it feels when a best-of list has unintended consequences. Our 2015 Restaurant of the Year, Renata, had to scrap plans for lunch after getting slammed by the award, though its owners ended up opening soup and sandwich shop Figlia, a fair consolation prize. And just a couple of months ago, La Osita, a great new breakfast taco cart in East Portland, had their generator stolen less than two weeks after we wrote about them. Apologies to everyone.)

Of course, the real story of why Stanich’s has closed is more complicated than the short-term rush of a best burger list. Steve Stanich hinted at personal problems. Readers have written in to say that the property would soon be sold and razed to make way for a multi-story development of the sort that has popped up all along this stretch of Northeast Fremont Street, rumors that don’t seem to be backed up by public records. And Stanich told Alexander the online reviews and social media screeds cut deep. As Portland comic Seth Johnston

, “(it) scares me that this guy understands the internet is bad, actually stays off of it, and it came for him anyway.”

-- Michael Russell

Elliot Njus of The Oregonian contributed research

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