Photo by Ivan Sciupac

A recent poll on Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” food blog asked readers to identify the hamburger that has most directly impacted their lives. The results are in, and burger connoisseurs in search of a mind-blowing experience had best head to Seattle, home of Dick’s Drive-In, which blew the rest of the field away with about 3,500 votes.

Wait? A hamburger in Seattle? Why do we care? Well, because behind Dick’s Drive-In and the Southern California-based chain In-n-Out (the most heavenly burger chain this writer has encountered), a handful of D.C. area hamburgers did pretty well relative to the rest of the field once Dick’s Drive-In’s apparent ballot-stuffing.

Five Guys and Black & Orange both finished third and fourth, respectively. What’s so life-altering about those places? In the case of Five Guys, we’re going to guess the complimentary toppings, free peanuts while waiting for your order and the company’s ever-growing ubiquity. With Black & Orange (née Rogue States), it could be the burger shop’s litigious history. Michael Landrum’s presidentially approved Ray’s Hell Burger also finished with a smattering of votes, barely eking out Shake Shack.

Still, perhaps all this talk of hamburgers is more trouble than it’s worth. Earlier this week TBD decided the D.C. area has probably had enough of the grilled meat patty thing:

“There is an inevitability to the hamburger: it is the most concentrated way a person can cheaply eat everything that people like about beef,” Josh Ozersky writes in The Hamburger: A History.

No one seems willing to pin the blame on us, the consumers. We follow the blog chatter, wait in line at high-profile openings, and tweet about restaurants’ tone-deaf gimmicks. And we’re the ones eating all that ground beef. Maybe it’s the economy — we can’t eat at Zaytinya every night, after all — and our enduring desire for something familiar, ideally with a twist that makes the age-old burger seem new again.

Maybe the diagnosis of hamburger fatigue is accurate. Then again, all this talk of life-changing hamburgers makes one wonder how America’s greatest food critic, Marilyn Hagerty, might wax about D.C.’s sea of burgers. Effervescently, probably, so long as the burger joints hold back on the raspberry lemonade.