The knock against Five Guys is that it's like the Olive Garden in that they don't season their food. Specifically, they don't put any salt on the burgers.
Someone from the Internets investigated a while back. They said they don't put any salt on the burgers to keep the product consistent. Which didn't make any sense to me. If they put salt on all the burgers, would they no longer be consistent?
I know every once in a while you get some dumbass who goes into a fast food restaurant and orders a burger with no salt on it. That happened sometimes when I was at White Castle. You'd have to clean off the entire grill and make a special set of burgers with no salt. It took all day.
Service at this particular Five Guys is such that if someone came in with a special order like that they'd have to shut down operations. When I was in there recently, there were only two guys working the grill, the fries, the register and handing out orders. It was a weird time of day, but there was still a shedload of people in there, because it's at a very busy intersection.
Also, it was like 100 degrees outside, and it may have been 80 degrees inside. It was a little bit cooler at the far end of the dining room, but not by a whole lot. One guy, i.e. half the kitchen staff, kept having to take his cap off and rub his face with his shirt. Both employees wore rubber gloves that they took off everytime they needed to touch something other than food--which goes to show how much fast food kitchens have changed since I was a young shaver.
Or is that just because you can see the entire kitchen from the register?
The theory at Five Guys is that if you order your burger "All the Way," i.e. with pretty much everything other than things that don't even belong on a burger, you don't even miss the salt. That's only kinda true. The toppings are really good, and the burger with all of those toppings on it is better than it has any right to be. But you can't help but wonder how good it would be if it had a truly obnoxious amount of salt on it, like senior citizens use.
Speaking of which, you can get the fries in either regular or cajun style. Cajun style is just the regular fries with half a quart of cajun seasoning dumped on them. In the brief (but not brief enough) amount of time I stood there waiting for my order, the guy must have gone through two and a half bottles of cajun seasoning. I of course opted for regular fries. People say they're too greasy; I don't know what the hell is wrong with them. They must be weird adults who refuse to eat anything other than chicken fingers and cheeseburgers with no pickles on them. The fries are the one inarguably good thing they sell.
Well, I guess there's also the shakes. The shakes are new since the last time I was there. I thought the whole idea behind Five Guys was to keep things simple? They must be feeling the pressure from Shake Shack. The price (like $5) brings the cost of the meal to an amount that could lead to domestic violence, but I figured, if I never get one again in life, I'd get one today, for the sake of citizen food journalism. You're welcome.
As John Travolta might put it, I don't know if it was worth $5, but it was a pretty good milkshake. Pause. I couldn't see behind the counter, but it tasted like it may have been hand-dipped. But it didn't seem to take the guy very long to make it, so who knows. Shakes from a machine tend to taste vaguely of toothpaste. This, on the other hand, reminded me of when they used to have hand-dipped milkshakes at Hardee's. Remember they had a burger that they jokingly called the $6 burger? Ah, the innocence of youth. read more