Not everyone has a Bobby's Burger Palace or similar near them. It's part of why places like Five Guys can succeed. They don't promise the world's best burgers, but it's not a bad burger.

The counter is great, although in a conversation about 5 Guys it's comparing a restaurant-style (or arguably, upscale diner-style) single-large patty burger with a fast food-size much smaller one. There's more meat in a single patty at The Counter than in two at Five Guys.

Restaurant-style prices too, albeit at the very reasonable end of that at least by the somewhat elevated standards around here. We have a better and cheaper local burger-place*, but my wife likes the counter a lot for the bowls and it's both better and a better value than a lot of the other local places.

(* Jeffrey's; they may not be wrong in saying they're the Bay Area's best, but they're certainly the certainly the best in the part of the mid-Peninsula between Burlingame/San Mateo/Belmont/San Carlos which is about the range of my 'hood where I can say I've pretty much tried everywhere that may qualify that isn't brand new.)

It's a thread about burgers. ;)

For many a year Kirk's was the Bay Area's Best Burger. Is it still in business?
(first location was California Avenue in Palo Alto, then they opened a couple more, don't remember exactly where)

p.s. mid-Peninsula starts at Redwood City and goes south. That's my home territory.:cool:

Not every good burger comes from a chain restaurant. Sometimes great food comes from independent, local places. (like that one outside Harrisburg :D)

When I weighed 280-290 lbs, I was a big fan of Five Guys and Fudruckers, and to a lesser extent, Smash Burger. But in my journey to below 200 lbs, (I'm at 185 now) those sort of massive burger slathered with sauce and cheese places became a thing of the past for me - my main fast food vice nowadays is El Pollo Loco. I haven't had one of those sort of slather-burgers in over 2 years.

Wait, which one??

Which one?
Not everyone who eats at Five Guys weighs that much. I know some people who could eat there every day and still not gain weight.

I hate those people. Clearly I am not one of them. :p

(No offense intended to any naturally-skinny people here on FlyerTalk--well, maybe a tiny little bit of offense intended. :p)

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/dinin...ger-world.html might be a better place in general, compared to one mainly comparing upscale fast food places.

Seems to have moved, if http://kirks-steakburgers.com/ is the right Kirk's. I thought I'd tried them, but the place I'm thinking off was near University not on California, and they were definitely not already in Town and Country back when I worked next to there.

I tend to avoid Palo Alto, but if I have to be down there for something else, I'll give them a try.

As tempted as I am to engage in an argument about what constitutes "upper" "mid-/middle" and "lower" Peninsula around here, definitions vary and I'll simply say that having spent pretty much the last decade around here (Foster City and San Mateo, I've never seen anyone refer to the area as "upper peninsula" or if giving an upper/middle/lower qualifier anything other than "mid-peninsula"

And mind, my point was not that the Burlingame-San Carlos chunk is all of the mid-Peninsula -- since while we differ on the direction the one thing we seem to agree on is that Redwood City is part of it, and while I'm down there for the movie theater a fair bit RWC is a big place (and changed a lot since I worked there in 1999-2001) and I've not tried the restaurants nearly as extensively as nearer in to San Mateo.

If Five Guys was my only choice, I would go to McDonald's.

I don't like grease running down my arm when I eat a burger.

How could you go to McDonalds when you said Five Guys was your only choice? :D

I actually don't think the burgers are horribly greasy--a little bit so, but not a ton more than any other burger (except for McDonald's, whose burgers are not greasy because they're made out of cardboard, apparently). It's really the fries that are greasy, plus it seems like there is aerosolized grease in the air of the store.

Someday I will have to do an experiment: get a burger only (no fries) to go and have someone else go in the store and pick it up...and then see if I feel like I am covered in grease after eating the burger. To date, I have not done that experiment bceause a) since the burger is best appreciated fresh, I always eat in, and b) if I'm going to plan to die early of a heart attack by eating a Five Guys burger, then I might as well enjoy the experience fully and go all-in and have some cajun fries, too. Thus, I always eat in and get a side of fries, and I always then feel like I've taken a bath in their fryer when I leave...

Ask Kipper; she was the one navigating. :)

They put a 5 guys on my college campus during my senior year (2008) and I put on the senior 15 after the first semester. Last time I ate there I felt like I took a couple of days off of my life.

The joys of growing up :(

What on earth is wrong with greasy burgers? Isn't the lovely taste of fat
most of their appeal?

Disclaimer: in college I used to sit at table with a dormmate who would
take his burgers and squeeze them between napkins and go "See?" I ate
them as is. He eventually won the Nobel prize in Medicine. I did not.