The phrase eating good in the neighborhood gets thrown around fairly often in conversations about…read morecertain chain restaurants, and your mom's hobbies (lol jk). Rarely is it more appropriate than when it's used to discuss my meal yesterday at Jovick Brothers Burgers.
I was in the area to meet up with my running group. It ended up being a lovely evening to dine out on the patio out front. It was a little bit later in the evening, on a weeknight, but I don't recall seeing anyone else dining in, inside or outside, though there was a steady stream of people in and out to pick up delivery orders.
I shudder to think what it might cost to have a disgraced former dentist bring you a burger, fries and what have you in his Prius, but it might be worth it, if you have the means. It would save you the hassle of trying to find this place. (My apologies if you live in the area. Perhaps needless to say, I am from West County.)
The girl who works the counter gives off the vibe of not being there to work, like maybe she just lives there, which I personally found charming. Your mileage may vary. She seemed to dread having to reveal that there's a surcharge for paying with credit, like maybe it's led to physical confrontations in the past. I didn't bother to inquire about whether I would have been allowed to place a cash payment in her waistband, since I didn't have any on me. (Remind me to hit an ATM.)
You're given the option of building your own burger, like at a Fuddruckers (but the guy in the back still puts it together), or you can select from a small handful of specialty burgers that seem like they may have been created by someone under the influence, including a burger with mayonnaise and peanut butter on it at the same time. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that's just a typo. They obviously created these menus themselves using circa 1996 desktop publishing software, and maybe they made a mistake.
If you're most people, you don't need to look any further than the Southsider, which is more or less their version of the Arch D-Lux at Hi-Pointe. (In general, this place is a knockoff Hi-Pointe, but in a remote location and without the marketing savvy.) It comes with bacon and cheese, LTOP and mayo. The onions are grilled. I didn't bother to do the math, because I didn't have my calculator handy (I was warned about this in 5th grade), but I don't think there was much, if any cost savings from ordering a bacon cheeseburger a la carte.
The Southsider might still be worth it though for the grilled onions. As was the case with the Blue Ribbon Burger at 5 Star in Clayton, which I also had recently, I was surprised at how much they made this burger. They're much more flavorful than anything you could make at home (unless you actually know how to cook), like a french onion dip made from a packet of soup mix, i.e. the best thing you can eat.
The beef was also surprisingly well-seasoned, almost to a fault. I'm too much of a savage to know if they used anything other than just salt. Maybe it's the maillard(sp?) effect, from how well-done it is. They cook the absolute crap out of both the burger and the fries. Usually, I prefer my beef a little bit pink in the center (I'll spare you a metaphor that occurred to me), but that might not be possible with the smash-burger preparation. One of the benefits is that they're surprisingly crisp and flavorful at the edges, almost like bacon.
I'm not sure what the thought was behind making the fries so well-done. Was the idea to make it seem like they're not cooked from frozen and possibly sourced from Ore-Ida? At any rate, to their credit, they come out nice and hot, and quickly. If you're part of a large group, they bring orders out as they're completed, rather than letting them sit around for a while and bringing them all out at once. You're sitting on rusted out lawn furniture, across the street from a boarded up SRO, so there's no concern about diving in right away. You might not even have to wear a shirt.