for lunch

For lunch today I drove 20 minutes to a place called Five Guys hamburgers. I'd read about it in a Q&A interview of a national baseball writer, who was asked to name his favorite places to eat while on the road. Five Guys was one of them.

I Googled the place and found that Five Guys is a chain, and that there are several of them in the Chicagoland area where I live. The closest one to my work place is in the city of Oak Park, less than 6 miles away, so that's where I went for lunch.

I'd never heard of Five Guys and didn't know what to expect. I was thinking it would be like McDonald's, with a drive-thru window and a big parking lot, but it wasn't anything like that. The Five Guys that I visited is located in a storefront on a semi-busy street. I was lucky to find street parking, but had to feed a meter so that I wasn't ticketed. Once inside Five Guys, I ordered up at the counter like everyone else, and then picked up my food when it was ready. Everything comes served in a brown sack, even if the plan is to eat in.

The decor of the place is simple, just tables and chairs and a counter along the wall if the tables are full. No booths, no waitpersons. The color scheme is red and white. Signs adorning the place have quotes from newspapers across the country, declaring "Best hamburger ever!" I don't know if that's true, but it is a good hamburger and fries. I ordered a small hamburger, which in fact isn't small. I'd done some pre-lunch research and found that a "regular" hamburger at Five Guys contains 70o calories. A "regular" serving of french fries is 620 calories. If you add cheese or mayo to anything, that's more calories.

The small hamburger isn't small in the way that a White Castle hamburger is small. The Five Guys small hamburger also dwarves McDonald's regular hamburger. I explain this so you realize that calling something "small" doesn't necessarily make it so.

I recently walked into a Wendy's to get a Diet Coke. I asked how big the "medium" drink was. The countergirl responded that the "medium" cup is what used to be the "large" cup, and the "small" is what used to be the "medium." I guess now the large size is as big as a bucket.

But back to Five Guys. The small hamburger was plenty enough, at 480 calories. I ordered a "small" fries, too, which isn't small, either, in that it filled up half my bag. I ate only half of the fries, however, which I figure was 310 calories. There were also free peanuts at all the tables, and I had a handful of those. So, what, gotta figure it was a 1000-calorie lunch, don't you think?

My rating for Five Guys is a big thumbs up. Is it the best hamburger I've ever had? Probably not, but it's very good, and fresh, and the foreign guy who handed me my bag of food looked me in the eye and seemed sincere in thanking me for coming in. That right there counts for something.