Members of the Marin Burger Club, who dream big, set themselves a peculiar goal: conducting the largest organized burger evaluation event in history.
They believe their quixotic quest—undertaken last week in Dillon Beach—secured them a place in the record books.
They weren’t trying to cook the world’s biggest burger, eat the most burgers or craft the juiciest burger. They simply aimed to impress with the precision of their measurements.
Whooping and hollering, 54 club members, all of them Marin dads, filed into the Coastal Kitchen last Thursday to snarf down burgers and have a good time. Emerging from a San Anselmo party bus, they arrived well lubricated, many with beers in hand.
These men take their work seriously. They’ve devised an app with a trademarked burger rating system. And they invented their own Burgermajigger—a special tool, patent pending, that measures the height and width of a burger at the same time. It also opens bottles.
When the night was over, the Coastal Kitchen had landed at number nine on the group’s list of Marin’s best burger joints, the Hall of Flame, and the men returned home brimming with good cheer and confidence.
They’re seeking recognition from the Guinness World Records and its main competitor, the Official World Record, which also compiles achievements both conventional and odd.
“We should be hearing back very soon,” Yair Levin, a club board member and its former president, said this week. “I’ve already printed T-shirts that say, ‘I am an official world record holder.’ And there’s one for our kids that says, ‘My dad is an official world record holder.’”
Because no one else has sought the same idiosyncratic record, the club is virtually guaranteed to set it. They’ve meticulously followed all the rules for inclusion, Mr. Levin said, so nothing should stand in their way.
The club members pride themselves on data-driven results, and after rating 1,500 burgers at 150 Marin restaurants, they have plenty of data to work with.
“Our chief technology officer, who has been a member for many years, helps us extrapolate data insights and tells us how a particular patty compares to others,” Mr. Levin said.
The club generally conducts assessments in groups of about 20, so as not to overwhelm the staff of the establishment. But for Friday’s ambitious event, they called in the troops.
Among them was Paul Renn, a real estate agent who divides his time between Fairfax and Marshall. He was a regular attendee for many years, but his participation dropped off after the pandemic.
“They wanted everyone to join, so I came out of retirement,” he said. “This is about camaraderie.”
In his father’s generation, Mr. Renn said, men could hang out at the Odd Fellows Club or Masonic Hall. His dad might disappear at the racetrack for 12 hours at a time.
“That’s not how families work today,” Mr. Renn said. “Dads are way more involved in raising kids. I drive my daughter to school, I pick her up, I take her to her horseback riding. This club is an opportunity for a bunch of Marin dads to just get out of the house and hang out for one day a month.”
That being the case, they invited The Marin Dad, a local influencer, to observe the proceedings and independently certify them, as required by the keepers of official record books.
“Thank you for inviting me into your humble community,” the Marin Dad said. “When I heard 54 men would be measuring their meat, I was in. A young J.F.K. once said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’ And you men are doing something for your country, for your county. Let’s measure that beef!”
The club began 12 years ago as a place for new dads to meet once a month to discuss life and parenting challenges and have a good time. In the early days, it was just a half-dozen friends, but word quickly got out.
Though the club has many techies and engineers, members run the gamut, from financiers to firefighters. They make a point of giving back to the community, donating to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and Toys for Tots and promoting men’s health. The club is one place a guy might find himself discussing both ketchup and colonoscopies.
“While we realize the irony of a burger club being mindful of heart disease, these are the things that we should be talking about as we age,” said Jason van den Brand, a senior executive at Credit Karma and the club founder. “The number-one killer of men over 40 is loneliness. It’s difficult for a dad who is new to the community to make friends. The club connects people. We’re forging a community.”
On Thursday, their big night, the men were noisy but polite, raucous but good-humored.
“There’s a lot of manly energy, that’s for sure, but I’m getting positive vibes,” said Emma Burnett, a Coastal Kitchen server who was the only woman in the dining room. She was fascinated by the Burgermajigger. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.
The device is a small piece of L-shaped plastic about five inches wide and is produced on a 3D printer by the club’s engineering team. If you lay it gently over your burger—be careful not to squish the bun!—it measures height and width in increments down to an eighth of an inch. On the front, there are four openings to calibrate the size of a French fry.
“Before I go into the specifics of how you measure, I just want to say this is only certified for measuring burgers,” Nick Stielau, a member of the engineering team, cautioned the group. “This is not for measuring blood intoxication, alcohol level or life goals.”
He spoke with the urgency of a coach pumping up his team. “You have to keep this close to the vest,” he warned. “There might be people trying to steal this technology, such as North Koreans—or perhaps even some misguided Marin hot tubbers!”
Mr. Stielau, who works for open-source software company Red Hat, applied for a patent on the Burgermeister in Nicaragua, because that was the least expensive place he could find. He was elected club president later in the evening after articulating all the reasons he would be bad at the job.
The designer of the first-edition Burgermajigger was Casey Barberino, the director of mechanical engineering at L’Oreal, where he developed a device to help people with shaky hands apply makeup.
In addition to the Burgermajigger, club members use their trademarked PBASO rating app to assign a one- to five-point score to the patty, bun, accoutrements, starch and overall experience.
When the ratings came in on Friday, the Coastal Kitchen burger, crafted with Stemple Creek Ranch beef, earned an overall score of 4.2. That was good enough to crack the club’s top-10 list, which includes the Inverness Tap Room at number three. Chef Zach Agus and his team knocked Finnegan’s Marin, a Novato establishment, down to number 11.
“He went down the mushroom route, which is a very risky route to take,” said Mr. Levin, whose wife and children are vegetarians. “It can become sweaty if you don’t do it right, but he absolutely nailed it. The patty was well seasoned, and the level of char was spectacular.”
Mr. van den Brand praised the bun for its “bouncebackability.” That is just one of the trademarked terms the club developed to describe a burger, along with “soakyupedness” and “holditogetherness.” “We absolutely love it when these things become common language for how we think about burgers,” Mr. van den Branch said.
If anyone borrows their trademarked terminology, the club leaps into action. “We have a lawyer on staff who is a member of the crew, and we send cease-and-desist orders like it’s our main business,” Mr. Levin said. “We’re taking this very, very, very seriously.”