They’ve been working on the building for a couple of months, and giving hints to the media, but now they’ve put up a “Coming Soon” sign and confirmed it. In-N-Out Burger is coming to Carson City. An article in yesterday’s paper (I couldn’t find the article online, but Sean Harding found it at the Record Courier) also mentioned the one in Reno that’s being built, and is actually a few stages ahead of ours. That one’s set to open a couple of weeks ahead of the one in Carson, sometime in September.

It’s a little misleading to say the burger joint is “in” Carson City. It’s actually on the other side of the county line, in one of the shopping centers that led to the feud I wrote about last year. So being on the outskirts of Carson, it will probably be called the “Carson City In-N-Out”, but it’s actually in Douglas County. (More confusingly, it’s being built in the “Carson Valley Plaza”, which isn’t actually in the Carson Valley. You’ve got a couple of hills to go over before you get there. The newspaper kept up the confusion with their headline “In-N-Out Burger coming to Carson Valley.”)

While reading a sidebar in the paper (paraphrased from the official company history) along with this article from Los Angeles Magazine, I was reminded me why I love the place so much. It’s not just the taste (which is great), it’s the company itself. It’s still family owned and operated. There are no franchisees and no stockholders to please. All their advertising is done by word-of-mouth. There are no freezers or microwaves on the premises. If you look in the kitchen you can watch whole potatoes being sliced into french fries. There are no kid’s meals or chicken nuggets or Six Dollar Bacon Macs with Soy Cheese or Caesar Oriental Salad with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Applesauce on the menu. Just burgers and fries. Made by people who are paid more on their first day then most managers are after working for years at the other places. Sure they reference bible verses on their wrappers, but you know what? They’re so good, I can forgive them for that.

And when I can forgive someone for pushing religion on me, you know that’s something special.

A month and a half to go.