Burgers! Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I do love burgers. And the burger has gotten a lot of culinary attention over the past few years. Locally, we got Burger Jones, we got our first few Five Guys, we got some Smashburgers... even the fast food places are pretending to step up and offer better burgers.

And now we have MyBurger, down near the Whole Foods just west of Lake Calhoun, on Excelsior Boulevard. And if you've been anxiously awaiting a sort of middle ground between Five Guys and Smashburger, you are fucking well set.

The interior's kind of if a Five Guys had sex with a Chipotle. That Five Guys counter vibe, but with lots more stainless steel and light wood. No peanuts. A few tall tables and chairs, a bunch of standard tables, a soda fountain.

Unlike Five Guys, MyBurger is counter service. Standard stick a number at your table stuff. There's no wi-fi, but to their credit, I'm pretty sure their personal secured wifi access point is named "All Your Base Are Belong To Us", which is cool.

The menu is basically customizable American-style burgers with some topping options and cheese choices, plus some outliers. There's a fish burger, a chicken burger, and a veggie burger. There are options for teriyaki sauce, cajun spice, and jerk spice. But the mainstay is the "Original" ketchup, mustard, onion, and pickle burger that you'd be familiar with if you like clowns and arches. There's also a California option, which is lettuce and tomato, and mayo.

I got a double original with lettuce and tomato. The patties are thin, and very very nicely charred. The flavor's on the milder end of the beefy spectrum, but good. There are no temperature options, or at least I wasn't offered any. The bun is nice, but nothing special. The toppings are, like 5 Guys, a bit of a mixed bag. I mean, ketchup is ketchup, mustard is mustard, and the pickles are good, but the onions didn't have much flavor, and the lettuce and tomato just seemed to water down the overall burger taste.

I do like the burgers better than Five Guys, but there's something about the way Smashburger gets powerfully flavored toppings and cheese to work with and accentuate its big, beefy patty that I still prefer. Fries are fries. Very competently prepared, hot, crispy, salty, but they're not special - just fast food fries.

I'm trying not to praise with faint damning here - it was a fine burger and fries. But the real kicker? The thing that will bring me back to MyBurger when I want a burger fix? The price. It's a really good value. Two of us, two burgers, some extra cheese toppings, one drink? A dime short of sixteen bucks. I never get two people out of Smashburger for less than $20. It's cheaper than Five Guys, too. And closer and more convenient and better except for the fries and no fucking peanuts everywhere.

So, yeah. Not a place to go out of your way to, as such, but definitely a place to keep in your burger rotation if you have one in the vicinity. And I'm curious to see what their more out-there options are like.