A fresh approach to burgers

In this burger joint, there are no heat lamps. Not one microwave. There’s not even a freezer.

When Dave Lish says his food is fresh, he means it. From hamburger and chicken produced in Washington state, to the potatoes sliced and trucked thrice weekly to his D. Lish’s Great Hamburgers restaurant on North Division.

“Fresh. That’s our niche,” he said, a broad smile lifting his handlebar mustache.

Six years ago Lish opened his hamburger shop with his wife, Anne Marie Lish. The two have been married for 32 years and say they’re having a lot of fun running their own business.

During the lunch rush, Dave takes orders at the till and greets his customers. With a quick smile and an insatiable appetite for a good story or laugh, he’s a perfect front man.

Anne Marie does the heavy lifting. She keeps the books and makes the French fries.

Together they have withstood the fate of most restaurants. They haven’t just stayed open — which is something 90 percent of restaurants in Spokane fail to do after several years — they’ve made a small profit and kept a core of employees crucial for customer service and quality food.

Lish doesn’t consider the restaurant fast food. He calls it “half-fast food.”

“Your order might take us five minutes or so,” he said.

Making it all work was the real challenge. Neither of the Lishes had a lick of experience in the restaurant business. Dave worked for a company that had a contract to provide services to Fairchild Air Force Base. When the company decided against bidding on future work, the couple was faced with a decision: Do they prepare to move, or do they find something else to do in Spokane?

Today they are satisfying hundreds of burger eaters and are poised to open a second restaurant in the food court at downtown shopping mall River Park Square.

Lish envisions a mini-chain of five stores and someday hopes to expand to Spokane Valley, Airway Heights and North Spokane.

To get there, Lish said the restaurant has to continue offering something a little bit different than the competition.

It’s all about fresh ingredients, he said. “I talk about that a lot, and it’s now our credo: ‘If I have to give up freshness and quality, we’ll lock up the doors.’”

So all of his hamburger comes from local Angus Meats Inc., which sells D. Lish hamburger made from the steak trimmings of steers in Ellensburg. Anne Marie wrinkles her nose when talking about how some restaurants use hamburger from old cows and ingredients like soybeans to stretch the meat.

D. Lish workers mix the restaurant’s own tartar sauce and special sauce recipes.

And perhaps different than most restaurants, the potatoes for D. Lish French fries come from Duncan Produce in the Spokane Valley.

Many fries sold in restaurants are battered and frozen. It makes them uniformly crisp, firm and golden brown. But they aren’t fresh.

The fries from the Duncan farm are sliced and sold fresh for cooking. It took Lish about six months to find the right potato. He claims he lost sleep over “fry issues.”

He tried buying them from local markets, but the fries would turn out limp and too greasy. He tried different oils. He mixed and matched oils and different varieties of potatoes. He adjusted the temperature of the fryers.

Nothing worked until he tried potatoes from Duncan and learned about storage techniques that affect a potato’s starch and sugar content.

“When we got that worked out, whew …” he said.

He counts the various fry experiments among his worst decisions as a restaurant owner. Mistakes he blames on his own inexperience.

His best business decisions can be attributed to his knack for culling good employees from pools of applicants.

“We hired the right people,” he said. “Honestly, we couldn’t have done it without them.”