Cuisine: Fast-food/ Hamburgers
Location: 161 E Huron, Chicago, IL
Price: $
Food: ***
Service: Counter service
Overall: ***
Website: http://www.mburgerchicago.com
Last summer, while scouring the immediate vicinity of my
workplace for feasible lunchtime options, I was pointed toward M Burger,
Lettuce Entertain You’s answer to fast-food hamburgers. And I remembered it
being glorious – thick, creamy milkshakes, delicious hamburgers (with a secret
menu, to boot!), and crispy crunchy fries. However, because of M burger’s
downtown location, I was left with nothing more than ethereal memories of
lunchtime greasy fast food gluttony once my schooling days resumed at Northwestern.
Fast forward to me now, being all boss-like with a job and
what not in the real world – as luck would have it, I work a five minute walk
from where I did last summer, which, amazingly, places me within walking
distance of not one but two M Burger
locations! Oh, the options! I could go to one today and the other one tomorrow!
I could go to one constantly and establish myself as a regular! I could work
for a whole month and not go to either because I have no money and would prefer
to bring lunches!1 But on the
last working day of the 2011 calendar year, with nothing better to do than sit
in the office vegetating while staring blithely at a computer screen, I decided
to further my state of extreme inactivity by going out to get some M Burger and
stuffing my face for lunch.
It begins with a solitary fry, plucked from the depths of
the brown paper bag – one of the extra spillovers, scooped up by my greedy,
grubby fingers and shoveled into my mouth. The crisp snap of a well-fried
French fry, followed by a salty burst of flavor – just the way I remembered it!
They avoid the dangerous limp-fry syndrome that McD’s displays all too often,
and are liberally salted to the point where eating one starts you off on a
vicious cycle of cramming the whole bag into your face within seconds.
Delicious!
To top off the salty taste, I take a big gulp of my vanilla
milkshake – and it is wondrous. It is thick without being concrete, and a
beautiful blend of milk and cream that makes it feel like liquid ice cream in
your mouth. For the milkshake alone, M Burger is a wild success – especially
for someone like me who considers ice cream to be an all-seasons kind of food,
I would make the trek there just for the milkshake. It doesn’t hurt that they
have flavors of the month that keep changing to add variety to their menu.
Finally, the piece de resistance – the burger. I’ve opted
for the M burger, which comes with cheese, bacon, and their secret sauce –
which, like every other secret sauce in the world, uses thousand island as a
base. I take a big chomp out of it, sending meat, lettuce, sauce, the works
into my mouth. Pause, then… sadness. It’s on the salty side, the meat is tender
and the sauce is sweet and tangy, but together, there’s just nothing special
about the burger. It’s certainly not bad – it’s just not great, not what my
year-old memory of it remembered it being. Was it the trips to Edzo’s, Kuma’s,
and DMK’s that jaded me so? Have I reached a level of burger snobbiness that
renders me impervious to cheaper offerings now?
Part of it, I think, is my newfound love for medium rare
burgers – something fast-food restaurants simply cannot deliver due to the
efficiency with which the burgers come out, plus what I imagine is the danger
of undercooking them if they try and make each one medium-rare (just my
hypothesis). I’ve tried to make my own burger patties at home medium-rare
before, and I either am worried about the degree of doneness and they sit for
too long, or I pull them too quickly and they’re under. Or I’ll try and wick
off a little slice to check how pink the center is, and the entire thing
crumbles into shards and pieces. So I understand it’s a
tough process.
Bottom line: M Burger’s shakes are to die for, their fries
are very good, but their burger is just good. Not that I won’t give them a
chance to prove me wrong – I love fast food burgers too much not to go back and
pray that I’ll get a perfect juicy burger slathered with secret sauce that
makes me go “MMMMMMM M BURGER MMMMMMM YES!” Until then, though, my memory of
burgers past will have to do.
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