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Good Eats - Five Guys
Free peanuts and paper bags you can see through?
Finally, we welcome Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries to our neighborhood (just a block away from our apartment). Five Guys started in DC (voted #1 burger by Washingtonian Magazine for 7 years) and now has locations in sixteen states (all east of the Mississippi). When living in Raleigh, they opened a location near my work. Needless to say, I've been there a few times.
The burgers are tasty and are of a higher quality than most fast food joints. The fries are fresh cut and a dry-erase board tells you which city and state the current day's potatoes came from. A standard burger consists of two patties and the list of available toppings (all free) is quite long (I opt for the "everything" cheeseburger, which includes about half of them). The fries come in a styrofoam cup but the overflow gets dumped on top of your foil-wrapped burger, causing grease spots to soak through the bag, which reminds me of the Simpsons where Homer has to rub food on the wall to see if he can eat it (as I've mentioned here). Now that I'm typing this, I'm also reminded of a diet pill I recently saw on The Colbert Report (it's at 3:55 in this vid) where one of the side effects is "gas with oily spotting" (another is "more frequent stools that may be hard to control" and their website says "it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants.") This blog provides some entertaining commentary regarding the pill's website.
But enough of those oily visuals, Five Guys is good stuff. For you vegetarians, they'll even sell you the bun and toppings with no meat at a reduced rate. Oh, and you can eat free peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. I watched Becca do this and it looked quite liberating.
Taste: Yum.
Cost: Less than six bucks for a double cheese burger, less than three bucks for a veggie.
Quality: Definitely not the Alpo-grade beef you'll find at those other fast food chains.
Atmosphere: Bright and clean, but nothing special. Kind of loud. You're probably better off getting it to go.
Health: Bring your portable defibrillator.
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I think my favorite part about my first experience was the cashier reminding EVERY customer, "We've got peanuts down at the end, and when you are done, just throw 'em on the floor!"- I think this is why she took the job, just to say that line. And let me tell ya, throwing those shells is liberating, makes you all crazy and enraged with freedom/tourets. It even made me scream absurdities like, "Fuck You,THE MAN!" and "This is for you George Washington Carver!" I think throwing peanut shells on the floor @ a food establishment could serve as therapy for abuse victims. And thanks 5 Guys for not making me pay as much as a meat eater.