Cheeseburger Gauntlet Day – 5; Grindhouse

America, I think I’m in pain.

The fifth cheeseburger has me in a figure four leg lock like Rick Flair. The burger wants me to tap out, but I won’t. I’m not a quitter. So my increasingly more clogged arteries and I present to you this blog entry.

We switched to lunch for day 5 because I play kickball in the afternoon. One of the newer places in town to grab a burger is Grindhouse. Grindhouse is located in the Auburn Ave. Farmer’s Market just near Grady Hospital.  You should be going to that market anyhow. It’s not as diverse as the Dekalb Farmer’s Market, but their meat prices are incredible. In addition to all the food vendors there are quite a few restaurants in the building, Grindhouse being one of them.

I will say that one of the coolest things about the day’s burger is the number of friends I ran into while there. I ran into two guys I work with. I also ran into two other friends I don’t get to see as often. One of them was getting a buger right in front of us in line.  I also had the largest group with me for this stop. There were the now featured players of Stefan, Emily, and Valerie, with special guest stars Tiffany and Dori. Dori is Stefan’s fiancée who we’ve managed to pull from a mountain of paperwork. Tiffany is one of my best friends who’s moving in less than 4 days to Cincinnati. She’s never eaten at Grindhouse so I decide to spoil her for the day and buy her a cheeseburger.

So the set up at Grindhouse is much like the setup at Farm Burger. You order and pay first picking all your toppings for your burger which is brought out to you. Its a lunch counter setup so its not as communal as the other places. Your limited to “line of sight” conversation.  But it’s sort of fun eating in the farmer’s market. There’s always a ton of energy around. It’s very clean so you don’t smell anything from any of the other stalls either.

Now on to the burger. The meat at Grindhouse is 100% Angus which is ground and cooked when you order. The bun is a potato bun which is a first for the gauntlet. It’s cooked on the griddle to order. Let’s take a look shall we?

Grindhouse Burger

It had to happen eventually.

Welcome to the most disappointing burger so far. This cheeseburger was a gut bomb. It felt like a small family of refugees moved into my belly and Wyclef Jean decided to throw a benefit concert for them.

The saddest part about the entire thing is that it’s not that bad of a burger… if you hadn’t had something to compare it to recently. But we have and we are keeping score. The thing is that it is a tasty burger once you get to the flavor of it. I like the grind on the meat, I like the flavor of the sear. But the burger was just too greasy.

Every burger thus far has been just as filled with toppings and the same amount of meat, but all were neater and easier to eat. This burger was stacked haphazardly and just kind of presented to us.  Everyone else was able to fit 5-8 ozs on a bun with no problems. but Grindhouse was too “sloppy”.  We all really wanted to like the burger, but the greasiness turned us all against it. Getting up from the counter felt like the beginning of the old Kung Fu series were David Carradine is walking through the desert with the pan flute playing in the background.

This is the burger I want at 2 AM after a night of drinking and shenanigans. It’s heavy, greasy and would soak up at least 10 drinks. But for lunch its way too heavy. I had to suffer to make it through the last two bites and I barely touched the fries.  Stefan’s opinion is that its because there wasn’t a full 24 hours between this burger and the last one, but even people who didn’t have the burger the day before thought it was heavy.

My grade for this burger is a C. Bocado is no longer at the bottom. The grease on this burger won’t let me give it a higher score. Maybe if I were drunk the grade would be higher, but I wasn’t so this is the grade they get.

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