Five months after the show was taped at Bar Louie in Downtown Milwaukee, the city's TV burger battle was aired on Travel Channel's "Food Wars," and the winner was AJ Bombers, besting the more senior burger establishment, Sobelman's.
The half-hour show began with a mini-travelogue, as host Camille Ford traveled from Karl Ratzsch's to the Milwaukee Public Market, talking beer, bratwurst and, of course, cheese.
That gave at least a little Wisconsin flavor to the burger battle, which became a Wisconsin cheeseburger with Wisconsin Colby cheese and Nueske's bacon. They picked "Wisconsin Foodie" host Kyle Cherek and burger expert Josh Ozersky to be the judges.
Ozersky voted AJ Bombers. Cherek picked AJ Bombers. So did Ford, making it unanimous.
"I'm ecstatic, absolutely," said AJ Bombers owner Joe Sorge.
"I'm ready for round two," said Sobelman's owner Dave Sobelman.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
