Your Burger, Your Rules: A Complete Guide to Custom Tartan Burger Perfection

Published by Tartan of Redlands | Redlands, CA

There’s a moment — you’ve probably felt it — when a burger arrives at your table and it looks exactly like what you imagined. The bun is toasted to the right shade of gold. The patty peeks out from the edges, just enough. The toppings stack in a way that suggests someone actually thought about the geometry of flavor. That moment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone cared enough to build it intentionally.

At Tartan of Redlands, that care is baked into the culture of the place — quite literally since April 15, 1964, when the Ctoteau brothers first opened their doors with a straightforward mission: great food, exceptional service, no shortcuts. Nearly six decades later, their signature Redlands Tartan Burger still carries that original spirit forward, one custom order at a time.

This guide is for the burger thinker. The person who doesn’t just order — they architect. Whether you’re visiting Tartan for the first time or you’re a regular who’s been sitting in the same booth since the Larry Westin Sr. days, this is your complete roadmap to building a burger that’s unmistakably, unrepeatable yours.

Why Customization Is the Heart of a Great Burger

The burger is one of the few foods in the American culinary tradition that practically demands personalization. Unlike a plated entrée that arrives as a chef’s complete vision, a burger is a conversation. It starts with a foundation — the patty, the bun — and then it waits for you to finish the sentence.

There’s a science to that conversation, and it goes deeper than just picking your favorite toppings. Building a truly great custom burger requires thinking in layers, balancing fat against acid, softness against crunch, richness against brightness. Get that balance right, and every bite delivers something new. Get it wrong, and even premium ingredients fall flat.

Here’s the framework.

Layer 1: The Foundation — The Patty

Everything starts here. At Tartan of Redlands, the beef quality isn’t an afterthought — it’s a point of pride rooted in the restaurant’s steakhouse DNA. The same kitchen that turns out premium steaks and the famous Saturday prime rib understands that a great burger begins with beef that actually tastes like beef.

What to think about:

• Doneness matters more than most people admit. Medium allows the fat to render properly, keeping the patty juicy without being loose or greasy. If you’re going medium-well for food safety reasons, ask about the fat content of the blend — a slightly fattier grind holds moisture better at higher temperatures.
  
• Thickness affects the topping math. A thicker patty demands bolder toppings because its flavor will dominate. A thinner smash-style patty, with its wider caramelized crust, welcomes more nuanced layers on top.
  
• Ask about seasoning timing. Salt drawn to the surface of ground beef before cooking can tighten the protein and change the texture. The Tartan kitchen knows their beef — trust the preparation, but don’t be shy about communicating your preferences.
  

Layer 2: The Architecture — Bun Selection

The bun is not filler. It’s structural, textural, and flavorful — and it’s the first and last thing your mouth encounters in every bite. Most diners underestimate it completely.

The core principle: match bun density to patty weight and topping volume.

A brioche bun brings butter richness and a slight sweetness that works beautifully with caramelized onions, sharp cheese, and aioli-based sauces. It’s the choice when you want the burger to feel indulgent and rounded. However, brioche can struggle under heavy, wet toppings — the structural integrity breaks down and the bottom becomes paste before you’re halfway through.

A sturdier toasted bun (think sesame seed, potato roll, or a classic kaiser) handles the weight of multiple toppings and sauces without collapsing. It also adds a neutral stage that lets more assertive ingredients — blue cheese, spicy jalapeños, tangy pickles — sing without competition from the bread itself.

Pro move: Always request a toasted bun, regardless of type. The light char on the inside face of the bun creates a moisture barrier that extends structural integrity and adds a subtle smokiness that ties the whole burger together.

Layer 3: The Character — Cheese Strategy

Cheese is where most burger builders make their first real statement. At Tartan, the selection reflects the restaurant’s classic steakhouse sensibility — this is not the place for gimmicky novelty. It’s the place for proper cheese, applied properly.

The melt matters:

• American cheese melts in a way that no artisan cheese can replicate — uniform, glossy, creamy. It’s not the most complex flavor, but it provides the ideal “adhesive” layer that binds toppings together.
• Sharp cheddar brings tangy contrast to rich beef. It doesn’t melt quite as smoothly, but the flavor payoff is significant — especially with pickles and mustard.
• Swiss is the sleeper choice. Mild, nutty, and buttery, it complements caramelized onions and mushrooms in a way other cheeses simply don’t match.
• Blue cheese crumbles are for the bold. The pungent, creamy bite of blue cheese cuts through beef fat like nothing else. Pair with something sweet — grilled onions, a fig or balsamic element — to balance the sharpness.

Layering tip: Two thin slices of cheese melt and integrate better than one thick slice. The coverage is more even, and the flavor distributes more uniformly through each bite.

Layer 4: The Personality — Toppings That Tell Your Story

This is where your burger becomes yours. But restraint is a virtue here. The biggest mistake in custom burger building is treating the bun as a container for everything you enjoy — the result is a burger where every flavor cancels the others out.

Think instead in flavor roles:

The Acid Element

Every great burger needs something bright and acidic to cut through the richness of the beef and cheese. Your options:

• Classic dill pickles — briny, sharp, clean
• Pickled jalapeños — acid plus heat, efficient on both fronts
• Tomato — milder acidity, adds moisture; works better on lighter builds
• Pickled red onion (if available) — sweet acid with visual drama

Choose one primary acid element. Two competing acidic toppings create confusion, not complexity.

The Textural Contrast

A uniform texture — even a great one — becomes monotonous by the fourth bite. You need something that breaks the pattern.

• Crispy onion rings or fried shallots — crunch without bulk
• Raw white onion — sharp bite and crisp snap
• Bacon — fat, crunch, and smoke in a single ingredient (arguably the most efficient topping in existence)
• Lettuce — underrated for its fresh coolness and structural crunch when kept crisp; always add lettuce last and on the top, never beneath a hot patty where it will wilt immediately

The Richness Amplifier

This is optional — the patty already brings substantial richness — but if you want to go full indulgent, one carefully chosen rich topping elevates the whole build.

• Caramelized onions — sweet, jammy, deeply savory; pairs especially well with Swiss or blue cheese
• Avocado or guacamole — cool, fatty, neutral; the topping equivalent of a cleansing palette moment
• A fried egg — adds silkiness and visual drama; the yolk becomes part of the sauce

Layer 5: The Finishing Touch — Sauce Philosophy

Sauce is the binding agent that unifies every element you’ve built. It fills gaps, carries flavor across the palate, and contributes to the moisture balance of the entire burger.

The golden rule: sauce goes on both bun faces, not just one.

The bottom bun gets a fat-based sauce (mayo, aioli, special sauce) that creates the moisture barrier. The top bun gets a sharp or acidic sauce (mustard, hot sauce, ketchup) that introduces brightness from the top down.

Classic combinations worth knowing:

The Redlands Tartan Burger: A Benchmark Worth Understanding

The signature Redlands Tartan Burger isn’t just a menu item — it’s a distillation of everything Tartan of Redlands stands for. Built on decades of community feedback, adjusted through the hands of multiple generations of ownership, and refined to reflect the unpretentious excellence the restaurant has always championed, it’s the burger you order when you want to understand what this kitchen does best.

It’s also the ideal starting point for customization. Because when you know what the benchmark tastes like, you know exactly what direction to push it.

About Tartan of Redlands

Understanding Tartan’s burger requires understanding Tartan itself — and that story begins on April 15, 1964, in the heart of Redlands, California.

The Ctoteau brothers — Velmer, Al, and Art — opened this restaurant with a vision that was refreshingly uncomplicated: serve delicious food, treat every guest like a neighbor, and build something the community would actually want to return to. That philosophy, planted in the mid-1960s, took root in a way that few restaurants ever manage.

Over the decades, ownership evolved but the spirit held. Larry Westin Sr. joined the Ctoteau family’s management and became deeply woven into the fabric of what Tartan was. When he passed in 2003, the restaurant carried his memory forward in the only way a place like Tartan knows how — by continuing to show up and do the work. His son, Larry Westin Jr., carried the operational torch until 2015, when Jeff and Lisa Salamon took the helm.

Jeff Salamon — a Marine Corps veteran from Boston — brought something to Tartan that aligned perfectly with its existing DNA: an uncompromising commitment to loyalty, community, and doing things the right way. Under his ownership, the traditions that the Ctoteau brothers established haven’t just survived — they’ve been honored with the kind of intentional stewardship that only someone who genuinely respects a legacy can provide.

The menu tells that story through its bones. The famous Saturday prime rib is a weekly event — the kind of ritual that regulars plan their weekends around. Premium steaks anchor the dinner service with the quiet confidence of a kitchen that knows its craft. And the Redlands Tartan Burger carries all of that history in every bite, a testament to the idea that simplicity, done with care, is never simple at all.

The bar — fully stocked and warmly lit — contributes to the atmosphere that earned Tartan its most affectionate nickname: the Cheers of Redlands. Walk in, and there’s a better-than-average chance someone will recognize you. Walk in enough times, and you become someone who gets recognized. That’s not marketing — that’s the earned result of six decades of genuine community investment.

Both indoor and outdoor seating ensure that Tartan is a year-round destination, not just a fair-weather stop. Whether you’re ducking in from a cold Redlands evening or sitting on the patio on a golden Southern California afternoon, the experience translates — because the warmth comes from the people and the culture, not the weather.