Heck’s Bar and Burgers

I had din­ner with Five Dol­lar Beer last night. We went to Heck­’s Cafe over on Bridge Avenue, because they appar­ent­ly have the best burg­ers in town. The burg­ers were good, but if they are the best burg­ers in town then Cleve­land sore­ly needs a real­ly good burg­er joint. Some­thing akin to CJ’s out of South Bend.

The place itself has that utter­ly unas­sum­ing look from the out­side that tends to char­ac­ter­ize most good burg­er places. Upon enter­ing I was greet­ed by a hand-stitched sam­pler inform­ing me that I would be seat­ed in a moment. That was cool. It was kind of weird to see the bar full of wine right behind it though. “Wine and burg­ers?” I thought. We were seat­ed by a wait­er in black pants and a white shirt, in a nat­u­ral­ly lit atri­um with a spi­ral stair­case and plant-life every­where. The nap­kins were cloth. This is a burg­er place?

We ordered rather quick­ly. I ordered the Rocky Riv­er burg­er [swiss cheese, bacon, sour cream, mush­rooms] with Cajun fries and a choco­late milk­shake with the meal. It arrived about ten min­utes lat­er [to me it felt like ten hours because I was hun­gry], we chowed down, paid, and left.

On the way home we dis­cussed the place. I was­n’t impressed by their burg­ers, they were good but not amaz­ing. We did a bit of math and deter­mined that the burg­ers are about $5.50 bucks apiece and the fries [which were real­ly real­ly good] are about $3.00. So for a five dol­lar ham­burg­er the qual­i­ty was accept­able.

The ham­burg­er pat­ty was about a half-inch thick and did­n’t take up the whole bun. I had about three bites of bun left­over when all the meat was gone. I was also a bit dis­ap­point­ed in their burg­er selec­tion, I’d like more vari­ety. Heck­’s does­n’t live up to the hype, it seems like it was try­ing to be more upscale [but with less char­ac­ter] than it need­ed to be [indi­vid­ual ketchup bot­tles?].

There has to be some place in Cleve­land where I can get a 10oz ham­burg­er with tons of dif­fer­ent fix­ins, the condi­ments on the table, a pitch­er of beer, loud music, a per­fuc­n­to­ry wait staff, and a grill god in the kitchen. Any­body know of one?

Plain Deal­er Review