biteintoboulder.com

1143 13th Street
Boulder, Colorado 80302
Five Guys menu

warning: if you have a peanut allergy, stay the hell away. seriously.

I don’t want to imagine the beginnings of Five Guys Burgers & Fries any other way than this:

5 best friends who all share a love for hamburgers and french fries get together and work in a kitchen that happens to be decorated only with red and white tiles.  They pump out burgers solely from their enjoyment of the process and their passionate love for the food.  They are having the time of their lives. Then one day out of no where, a man comes from the future and tells them that they must open restaurants in order to save the world. The 5 best friends have a meeting, and decide to do just that, and one after another they all quote Barney Stinson played by Neil Patrick Harris from How I Met Your Mother—”it’s gonna be legendary!”

This video pretty much sums up those 5 exclamations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKSdPfucDQA

Truth be told, it is pretty legendary.  And the teamwork in the kitchen is pretty fun to watch, especially when waiting in the lengthy line of numbers full of people who will get to enjoy their food before you.  Each station—register, potato cutting, french frying, burger patties, burger prep, etc.—has it’s own distinguished features that probably come along with a good amount of stress due to the Hill’s hectic overload of customers.

Granted I went on the first day they opened, I waited in line for about 5 minutes.  I’m not a patient waiter, ever, but when I was in line there were a few things that caught my eye, and entertained me enough to help pass the time.  Giant sacks of Idaho potatoes, giant boxes of peanut oil*, and free peanuts* to munch on while deciding your order.  Pretty neat, check it:

After all of that potato/peanutty fun, I ordered a Cheeseburger [$5.79] with lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, grilled onions, and grilled mushrooms.  You order a naked burger and choose from a list of toppings, even the essentials like lettuce.  But get this: all the toppings are FREE! Even the classy ones like grilled mushrooms, grilled onions. Awesome.  I also ordered Regular Fries [$2.69]… Besides its irresistible rhyme it makes out of the restaurant’s name, I couldn’t stop myself after eyeing those fresh potato sacks for so long.  After I was done ordering I saw my first quirk of teamwork: the register dude shouted “TWO PATTIES!!” but in a way that I could almost not understand what he was saying.  That’s right, each burger has two thin patties. /^_^\

Sadly I couldn’t find mine, but here are the burgers as they get topped at the topping station (teamwork woo hoo!):

When I got my food, it was put into a paper bag.  My burger was on the bottom with the cup of fries on top.  When I stuck my hand in to get my burger out, I tried not to spill the fries, but it was pretty much inevitable that it would happen.  My hand came out greasy, but gripping a delicious feeling burger (yeah, it felt delicious).  The process of getting my burger out of the bag caused me to squish it slightly, which pissed me off, but I remedied it and everything was A-OK.  The burger was fantastic.  Here it is just as I unwrapped the foil:

The fries were pretty good, a little soft for my liking, but still good.  My only objective problems with the fries were that they made it difficult to get my burger out of the bag, they made my hand all greasy, and there were way too many of them. I paid nearly $3 on fries that I couldn’t even finish a third of, and would have rather had the choice of getting a smaller order for cheaper.  Here are the copious amounts of fries.

But wait! There’s more!

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Even with the bagging dilemma, I must say Five Guys is pretty legendary. The only reason I wouldn’t go to Five Guys to get a burger on the Hill is if there was an In ‘N Out next door.  One day… one day…

/^_^\

PS: If any more restaurants on the Hill start excluding my nut-allergin-friend Will by using peanut oil on everything, I’MA BEAT THEM UP!

/-_-\