This is not high-art cuisine. These are not even gourmet burgers. No one will call the specialty of the house "chopped steak," and no one will offer you a slice of gorgonzola or Dijon mustard to enhance the meat. Hell, you can't even get anything as high-falutin' as a hamburger roll: At Louis' it's plain Wonder Bread wrapped around your burgers, take it or leave it. And Yale has such a long and intimate association with Louis' that it's treated as an ex-officio campus dining hall.

But this hallowed place is the very site where the hamburger was invented. And even though these burgers have the look and taste of the kind of patties you and your friends fixed for yourselves in junior high school, people travel hundreds of miles to visit this Vatican of ground-beef believers. Some who work downtown have never eaten lunch anywhere else. While not officially a part of Yale, Louis' Lunch is more deeply embedded in the psyche of Yalies than many of the more architecturally thrilling sites of central campus. -- Constance Markiewicz

NOTE: Louis' Lunch closes for the month of August for their annual inventory of spoons.