Beer Cheese Black Bear Burger with Bacon

Probably one of my favorite parts of Guardian was the Sasquatch Saloon. It took up half a chapter that was mostly filled with dialogue, but designing the décor, the owner, and the menu is something I took a long time with.

During this time, one of my favorite lunch spots was a local bar about ten minutes from the airport, that had earned a reputation for phenomenal burgers. (And they were delicious.) It was a bar, not a restaurant. They didn’t have servers and waiters, they had bartenders. The service was perfunctory, not polite, and it was always amusing when someone would start requesting a tailor-made version of the burger; they would be quickly interrupted and told that the burgers came one way. Call out to one of them from your table because you needed something, and they would call back telling you, “I’m not a waitress!” The out-of-this-world burgers often attracted a very different, almost touristy crowd that would saunter on in one day to try things out. It was always obvious and always funny when the people would come in, sit down at a table and try to flag down a “waitress”, try to order their burger a special way or try to pay at the counter – right underneath the big, black magic marker, hand-scribbled sign that said “cash only” – with a credit card.

These were some of the elements I wanted to capture in the chapter’s back woods Alaskan dive bar. The mounted front and back of the moose was taken directly from another restaurant in the Chicago area, as the decorative satire seemed at home here. The menu was concocted from a combination of what I discovered to be staples in Alaskan fare, what would be simple to keep on hand (remembering that this place isn’t a restaurant) and lastly, what I would enjoy eating myself. The trademark Beer Cheese Black Bear Burger with Bacon was kind of a combination of all factors.

The owner was always a local in my head, which fit and would make sense. As one from the area would likely partake in the local outdoor sports, it was reasonable to say that he and Elex would’ve met. I choose his name from an Inuk word for “wolf”. (It was during this research that I discovered the word “kabluunak” which was a slang term for “white man”.) After watching a few recent episodes of Hawaii Five-O, I decided making him enormous would make for an amusing and fun character. I’d also always wanted a Siberian Husky named Dakota, so I played with the breed a bit to make it more appropriate to Alaska.

So, I had the place, the owner, the food … now what to name it. Credit for “The Sasquatch Saloon” goes 100% to my wife who, after hearing me describe a seven-foot tall giant who lives in Alaska, said he sounds like either a yeti or bigfoot, and a moment later shouted out “The Sasquatch Saloon!”