Burger Paradise Lost

The resident teenager returned home Friday after a month in Japan. For her first home cooked meal, Saturday's supper, she asked for a hamburger. Now, Mom's not crazy about hamburgers, so I offered to make chicken parm, her favorite, and told her I'd come up with another plan for burgers.

As it happens, I recently heard folks on a radio talk show rave about the burgers at Fuddruckers in North Andover, off Rt. 495, not far from the Lawrence town line and less than 30 minutes from Carlisle. On Sunday, I suggested we go out for a burger and talked the girls into trying it.

Fuddruckers is a chain restaurant, so, like almost every other every chain, it's a game of hit or miss. When we walked into the place around 7 PM on Sunday and only a sparse handful of people were there, I was pretty sure it would miss by a mile.

Bill's Smokehouse Bacon and Cheddar burger didn't look quite as good as this one.

Fudds is what I'd call, 'semi-fast food', served do-it-yourself style. You choose the size of your burger (1/3, 1/2, 3/4, or 1 Lb.) plus any cooked toppings, such as sauteed mushroom or onions, plus your cheese of choice. They cook it up to order while you wait holding your ticket. If burgers aren't your thing, they also serve salads, a few of the usual suspect appetizers and sides, plus steak, chicken or fish meals and sandwich selections. Basically, not a bad concept for a family restaurant and the chain did become popular a few years ago, perhaps, I suspect, when real food people were more involved in the management.

I dunno. The feeling of the place was industrial, prissy and overly-organized. Places where the food rocks need a certain amount of chaos, I've always reckoned. The staff seemed populated by off-the-rack automatons, though very polite ones.

We picked up our drinks (thank god they serve beer) and found a table near the wall in the cavernous dining room. The place was like a wind tunnel. I found us a sheltered table in the corner where at least we wouldn't freeze to death before we had time to finish our dinner.

First off, the automaton who took our order got it wrong... silly me for asking for two things in one sentence. "Two bacon/cheddar burgers," I said, ordering for me and Marii. "One is a third of a pound, the other a half pound." He rung it up, and I never checked the fine faded print on the receipt. The small burger came to us plain.

Next comes a visit to the customization station, where I tossed on some veggies. Everything seemed fresh and well-tended... 2000 slices of tomato, for example, arrayed in long neat rows and hardly touched. Onions, Jalpenos, lettuce, pickles, salsa, etc., and a nifty Cheese Whiz pumping machine over at the intimidating high-volume condiment dispersal station.

At last, getting to the meat of the matter, I'll give Fuddruckers an A+ on execution, but a C+ overall on the burger. It's a matter of taste, quantity and price... as we Lambert's say, 'Cost Performance'. If I made a half-pound burger at home, it would be twice as thick and have a lot more taste. The Fudds burger had almost no taste and no seasoning to enhance flavor that I could tell. I'm guessing previously frozen ground beef was used, and of a variety with not enough fat to make a juicy, flavorful patty. Freezing only compounds the taste problem of low fat by squeezing out most of the juices.

My burger was cooked perfectly; the bun fresh, the insides grilled golden brown and just right. However, the 'smokehouse bacon' was scraggly--if it ever saw the inside of a smokehouse, it didn't taste like it. The 'sharp cheddar' was barely a thin slice and more soaked into the patty, rather than melted on top of it.

The ingredients were the problem, at least for the burgers. Too bad, because it's not cheap. Our order came to $32 and would have been $35 if they got it right. Those two burgers and a salad cost more than we spend for dinner in Chinatown.

A $10 burger had better be top notch if people are going to keep coming back. Evidently, they're staying away in droves, at least at this location.

May ordered something called a Yin Yan salad--grilled sesame chicken served with Asian dressing and fresh greens. She liked it. The seasoned steak fries that came with the burgers were tasty, though not quite crisped enough on the outside and you don't get a whole lot of them.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.0 Mediocre Tomato Salads