Category: burgers

Farm Burger, Decatur GA

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the blog is to order something my husband didn’t so he can get menu envy, or to describe some experiment that made it to the dinner table and turned out well. This time I am departing from tradition to describe our pre-anniversary dinner at Farm Burger, a locally owned burger joint that uses meat from animals that didn’t spend their lives in a box or being force-fed things they probably wouldn’t eat otherwise. We found out about the place from an AJC review, and from David, who gave us a glowing recommendation.

Now, regarding how animals were treated before coming to the table, I am quite willing to spend three times as much on animal products from humane sources. Farmer’s market eggs are a particularly good example, because they taste so much better than the plastic they sell in egg cartons at the grocery store. In this case, however, this good quality stuff is fairly comparable in price to the midrange ordinary. It was about $16 for the two of us to have a burger each and a nice-sized bucket of fries to share. How great is that?

The place was busy when we got there Saturday night around 8. All the tables full and only a couple of seats free along the side bar. We only waited about ten minutes to get to the counter and entertained ourselves by inspecting the menu, which contained topping options such as arugula and bone marrow along with the usual suspects–except ketchup. You can get that at the table, but it is not something they appear to believe ought to be on a burger. The ladies ahead of us in line asked the cashier if it was always this busy, and were told that this was slow.

After admitting this was our first time, we were asked about our doneness preferences and medium was suggested. This is something I’d read in comments before about grass-fed burgers–that you can’t let them get too done or they lose the special something that makes them so great. There was a table outside sitting empty when we carried our drinks and order number away to find a seat, and it was lovely weather so we braved the risk of smokers to enjoy the fresh air.

The food arrived quite promptly in little wire baskets lined with brown paper, and the fries were in a little tin bucket of the type that usually contains a mosquito repellent candle, also lined with brown paper. My burger had cheese and tomato, and Grant got one with tomatoes, red onions, chipotle mayo and mustard which he says was wonderful. (The general consensus is that despite the full menu of wild toppings, it is very easy to overwhelm the flavor of this beef, and keeping it simple is probably the ideal way to do it.)

They’re lower in fat than feedlot beef, although you’d never know it, as they were also incredibly juicy. That first bite was just wonderful. The rest were, too, but we’d had a steak recently that was pretty decent, and it didn’t have as much flavor as this burger did. And they were more filling, too.

We have a favored local burger joint whose meat patties are as large and whose buns are more substantial, and who have much bigger fries portions, but the meals we eat there aren’t as filling as these Farm Burger selections. Maybe it was that we’d had a substantial lunch that day, but I like to think that the food tasted so good it slowed us down, made us savor it more, and was as a result just more intrinsically satisfying. We’ll definitely be going back.

Farm Burger on Urbanspoon

(Update): In 2011, Farm Burger opened a second location in Buckhead. With our baby in tow, we stopped by this location a week before Christmas, confirming that these are among the best burgers in the city. They are certainly Marie’s favorite. They’re in the strip mall across from the Disco Kroger, downstairs from a Ru San’s.

Pictured is a daily special, a beef burger with pepper jack cheese, mustard greens, tomatoes, fried onions and FB sauce, along with a pile of very good fries buried under garlic and parmesan. Marie had her burger with beets, goat cheese and arugula. The food, the service and even the music were all excellent. Marie really enjoyed being introduced to a singer named Mike Snow. We really do like this place a heck of a lot.

Other blog posts, among many, about Farm Burger:

The Blissful Glutton (May 14 2010)
Food Near Snellville (May 18 2010)
The Food and Me (Aug. 22 2010)
A Hamburger Today (Aug. 26 2010)
Some Foodie Asshole (Jan. 13 2011)
Eat it, Atlanta (Feb. 15 2012)

Cheeseburger Bobby’s, Marietta GA

I’ve done our favorite quickie burger joint a disservice by mentioning them in the very first chapter and not returning to them for so long. Cheeseburger Bobby’s is a surprisingly great little place whose owner, once upon a time, inflicted the godawful Stevi B’s Pizza on the planet and evidently felt the need to do the food world some justice and come up with a much better concept. His debt paid in full, we consider him forgiven and shall move on.

Atlanta, as I have mentioned, is a little crazy for burgers, and we have a handful of local chains, notably Canyon’s, competing for attention. Cheeseburger Bobby’s first store, in Hiram, was a smashing success in 2007, and they’ve opened a further four locations in the northern suburbs, with two more due this year. They have not yet troubled the perimeter, forcing Atlantans who want to try one of the best burgers in the region to venture outside 285.

The Marietta store opened last year in a space vacated by a Great Wraps. There’s not very much seating available, and there is regularly a small crowd. This past Thursday, my daughter and I dropped in for an early supper. We do this often.

Cheeseburger Bobby’s promises that their beef is delivered fresh daily and never frozen, and they provide a fixin’s bar with, among other things, three types of lettuce, dill or sweet pickles, and red or white onions. Theirs are certainly among the best burgers in the region (possibly top five, definitely top ten), and unquestionably the best priced. Two people can eat here for under twelve bucks, and they have both a bribe card program to get you back in and a stack of coupons that never seems to reach the bottom. They also do custard, and I’ve taken to turning down the dollar custard coupons, as my wallet is bulging with them.

They also grill up a mean hot dog, one of the four or five best in town, and, sensibly, have celery salt on the fixin’s bar. A liberal sprinkling of that, ketchup, mustard, white onions and relish and I’m happy as can be.

Every so often, we’d splurge on a little dessert and get some custard, but a few weeks ago, they introduced one of the weirdest and most wonderful concoctions around the city: a Twinkie milkshake. It’s unbelievably rich and served with whipped cream and half a cake. I’m never going to lose weight with these things on the menu.

I think Bobby’s has been in this space for a year now and it really worked its way into our affections without much effort or muscle, just doing the right thing and doing it very well for a nice price. It’s the immediate default when we’re thinking about a quick meal and don’t want to either drive anywhere or spend a lot of money. They seem to be making out okay, with an incredibly upbeat and friendly staff and a dining room that rarely lacks customers. It’s our neighborhood place – long may it thrive!

The Burger Club, Vinings GA (CLOSED)

Perhaps unjustly absent from the ongoing tales I tell on this blog is a sense of history and place. We live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, a town with many very good restaurants but few claims to culinary originality and superiority. Atlanta in fact has almost no claims to a solid tradition in any one style of dining. The city is a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

Except hamburgers. There is not a population center anywhere in this country with as many excellent burger joints as Atlanta. I could write about nothing but burgers here for months and not scratch the surface. The Wall Street Journal agrees that, between Ann’s Snack Bar and The Vortex, we’re untouchable. That’s not to say that better individual burgers might not be out there in your own town – in point of fact, take thirty bucks to a little place I know in Vermont in the summer and you will be served a burger so many times superior to any you’ve ever had that you will weep, knowing the game is over – but shack for shack and joint for joint, the batting average of Atlanta beats the hell out of any other city in America.

We’ve come up with some pretty crazy concoctions to enhance the beauty of burgers in this town. It’s certainly enough to grill or fry a perfect patty, but only in Atlanta would somebody come up with the Luther Burger, which dispenses with the bun and serves the patty between two halves of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and named for crooner Luther Vandross. Mulligan’s, the joint that came up with the recipe, closed a few years ago, but not before giving their seal of approval to Turner Field to continue the tradition at Braves games.

Over the last decade, while perfecting their recipes for perfect burgers and debating the merits of angus versus kobe beef, a few places have also tinkered with oddball experiments like the Luther. Over in Vinings, the Burger Club, a family restaurant run by the team behind the upscale Paul’s and Social Vinings, has a dozen or so weird and wonderful house specialties on the menu. Among them, their own take on the Luther. Called the Artery Annihilator, this doughnutty mess also includes bacon and cheese. No, I didn’t order one; I’m in rotten enough shape as it is and don’t want my arteries annihilated.

Fortunately for us all, my son was in town this week.

So the Burger Club moved into a space vacated by an Atlanta Bread Company that had been there forever. It’s on Paces Ferry Road, right in the heart of Vinings, next door to the fire station. It’s slightly separate from the Vinings Jubilee open-air mini-mall, where my bored crowd of high school punks would often go on Friday evenings in the late ’80s after we’d been kicked out of Cumberland. The parking lot has space for about two dozen Smart cars, or two Cadillacs. Since my parents wanted to take their precious grandson to supper, but drive nothing but Cadillacs, parking was a challenge.

Me, I had the Gastro Pub Burger, which is served with bacon and a blend of red onion marmalade and Roquefort cheese, with tater tots on the side. The burger was indeed a good one, but heaven only knows why I can’t resist these darn tots. Perhaps because I just had onion rings the day before, I passed on those, but surely any of their sides would have a little more oomph to them than a bag of frozen Ore-Ida brand tots, no matter whether I sprinkle a little salt on them or not.

In fact, my dad, who, like my mother and Marie, just had a basic beef burger without any of the specialty trimmings, said that his onion rings were among the best he’s ever had. Then again, he always eats his onion rings with Heinz 57 sauce. Nobody has a lot of sympathy for that.

But my son, well, he had his arteries annihilated. He was last heard muttering something about a “perfect blend of savory and sweet” before lapsing into a coma. Normally I’d have a bite, but I’m trying to cut down on the life-ending things. Back when I was making mistakes in 2004, though, I’d probably have had a dozen a day. It was that kind of year.

(Sadly, The Burger Club closed in December, 2010.)

Just Around the Corner, Atlanta GA

I’m going to be so depressed when Marie’s job moves out to the Perimeter Mall area in the next month or so. Once a week, we meet for lunch downtown. The original idea had been to meet in Centennial Olympic Park and enjoy a nice picnic outside, but she has a longer lunch than me, and, honestly, I got a little tired of rushing back to work with a belly full of lunch and spending the next two hours feeling like I was going to lose it. So now she picks up our grub and we eat here at my job and it’s much more pleasant. Maybe this week, we can enjoy a nice meal on the tables outside.

More often than not, Marie picks up a burger and fries from Just Around the Corner, a teeny little place at the intersection of Spring and Marietta. I’ve actually only set foot in the place once, so I really can’t tell you much about it. It’s got just the sort of look to it that let you know, correctly, that they’re doing something right. It’s like one step up from a hot dog cart, with only room inside for perhaps five people. And in much the same way that some of the best meals come from street vendors – I don’t know that there have ever been falafels anywhere as good as the ones that this one Turkish fellow used to serve from a little cart just below Leconte and Park Halls on the UGA campus in the mid-90s – the burgers at Just Around the Corner are just dripping with character and style.

Over the last decade or so, Atlanta has really nicened up the area around the park, trying to make the place much more attractive to tourists. The whole area’s so much cleaner and family-friendly than its reputation holds. Nearby parking is usually under $10, and with so many museums and activities to check out, I imagine that you can easily find plenty of things to do, and have a really nice, juicy burger to top it off. And if you’re coming into town for an afternoon Hawks or Thrashers game, it’s certainly better than your options inside Philips Arena, and a lot cheaper, too.

Looks like the dogwoods are blooming in the park today. Yeah, maybe we can sit outside and enjoy our burgers with nature before it starts erupting with pollen too terribly. I’ve probably only got about 72 or fewer hours left before I will want to dig my eyeballs out with spoons, so I might try and enjoy the weather while I can, you know?

The Red Eyed Mule, Marietta GA

So Marie and I have been thinking for a good while about eating better, and enjoying what we eat more. Inspired by Calvin Trillin’s remarkably entertaining Tummy Trilogy (which I reviewed here and which I thunderously recommend you all purchase before the weekend’s out), I’ve decided to do a little better job documenting our travels and finds.

That said, we started today by having lunch at The Red Eyed Mule in Marietta. This is a little hole-in-the-wall with a small menu of breakfast and burgers that opened on January 19th. I heard about it from the report at Atlanta Cuisine and it’s really just a hop, skip and a jump from us, on the other side of I-75. It’s on the Church Street Extension, in a small building between Runaround Sue’s and Elizabeth Feed & Seed.

The really neat thing is that the building has been there for a really long time, and was most recently used as a storage shed by Runaround Sue’s. It was rebuilt in the 1930s after a tractor-trailer ran through it; at the time, it was… well, a “speakeasy” isn’t entirely accurate, but it was a place people could go to discreetly avail themselves of some liquor. The feed & seed next door is very old indeed; the business dates back to the Civil War although they’ve relocated several times. The current location is equidistant from Atlanta, Woodstock, Cartersville and Douglasville by old roads.

They have a small lunch menu of four different burgers on Texas toast, and we were very pleased with ours.

Marie also got a cup of white bean soup, which was served a little hotter than I prefer, but I really enjoyed it when it cooled enough. It’s served with two small cornbread muffins.

The burgers were very good, and I love that they’re served on Texas toast. We each just had the simple burger-with-garden option, but they have a couple of interesting varieties available as well. Any place that serves burgers with fried eggs gets thumbs-up from me. I like the burgers better than Cheeseburger Bobby’s, which we enjoy hugely, and where we usually go for a quick burger in the evening. That’s actually the only strike against Red Eyed Mule. Since they close at 2 and are not open Sundays, it really limits the opportunities we have to visit. But I hope one or both of us can get back there soon.

Other blog posts about The Red Eyed Mule:

A Hamburger Today (Mar 13 2012)
The Quest for the Perfect Burger (Mar 31 2012)