Elevation Burger

I have two general rules about food. I don’t eat chain fast-food (well…, I make exceptions for In-N-Out sometimes). I don’t eat at places for the month or so after the initial opening until the dust is settled.


I broke both rules.

Elevation Burger is a [still] very small social and environmental responsible company that is based in Arlington, VA. Its philosophy is to use materials only from natural and sustainable [local] sources for its products. This also extends into its building and waste disposal practice with LEED Certification (more info: www.usgbc.org) for many of its restaurants. The company emphasizes ”Ingredients Matter” which food should have real taste and quality, and should be healthy for the consumer and the planet.

I think healthy for the consumer part is pushing it a bit. We are still talking about fast food here! It may be “healthier” than places that use industrial agriculture products*, but a burger with fries is still a burger with fries. Calling them healthy is an oxymoron.

The local restaurant is the first of the few planned for the Philadelphia area. I have known of its coming for a while but was never sure of its opening. I was actually a bit surprised that the company would put the pioneer restaurant in the Philadelphia area in a strip mall located in a sleepy Main Line suburb.

The restaurant has its soft opening during the July 4th weekend. Within days, burger-centric bloggers were already posting reviews. The social and environmental conscious corporate practice got me excited about the new restaurant; the bloggers got me curious to check out its food. Being only a few minutes from our house was the extra credit in getting me there sooner than I would; plus we were in a hurry trying to catch a movie that night.

The Burger

We ordered a simple cheeseburger and the Elevation Burger (it was basically a double cheese burger). There was also a Vertical Burger which you can choose to have 3 to 10 patties between the buns; a salad and a grilled cheese option; and you could also choose to have the patty wrapped in lettuce if you were on Atkins. Then there were the veggie burgers in “fire roasted” or “veggie’ flavor and the Half the Guilt Burger with one meat and one veggie patties. Now, what’s the point of eating a “veggie” burger? Really! If you have the inkling for a burger, get the real thing! Eating a “veggie” burger is like faking an orgasm. Really!

Since everything is cooked to order, you can choose the toppings you want after you choose the burger. I had ketchup, lettuce, tomato, pickles and caramelized onions on my Elevation burger with Tourist Tree having the ketchup, lettuce, tomato, and caramelized onions on her cheeseburger. We both skipped the mustard, mayo, raw onion, balsamic mustard, hot pepper relish, and Elevation sauce toppings. I generally stay away from “house” or “special’ type stuff which is usually more gimmicky than anything else. Elevation sauce is a creamy tomato’ish sauce.
 

Since everything was made fresh to order, there was a slight wait for the food after the order was placed. The weather was gorgeous, so Tourist Tree went outside to claim a table while I stayed inside for our order which gave me a few minutes to look around the restaurant. I was surprised at its smaller size. The open kitchen was immediately to the right and toward the back of the restaurant. The staff seemed to be working in a quite coordinated low-key manner getting the orders out. Everybody seemed to know what they were doing. I did not notice anybody doing Chinese fire drills. There was also one person constantly going around cleaning and tidying up the not so big and not crowded dining room.
 
Our order was ready within in a few minutes with a guy standing outside the kitchen with a tray full of our food. I took up his offer to deliver the food to our table outside.
 

The burgers looked good. We could clearly see the liberally used locally sourced lettuce and tomato in the sandwich. I cannot stand places that skimp on toppings, or anything else. A piece of real (not processed) cheddar cheese was melted nicely over the patties, although we did have to dig and looked for the caramelized onion. The burger was made with beef from natural, organic, free-range, glass fed cows with the meat ground fresh on the premise. My initial bite did not disappoint me. The softness of the buns, the crispiness of the lettuce, the sweetness of the tomato, and the natural beefy flavor of the meat was very satisfying. Comfort food type satisfying. It reminded me of an In-N-Out burger but a bit more refined and upscale. A word of caution: The beef may taste “different” to those who are so used to eating corn-feed American beef from industrialized feed lots. It has a bit of a more earthy and grassy taste and it is leaner (hence, healthier for you). However, most people probably would never notice the different since they habitually smother their burger with lots of ketchup. I thought the single patty was too thin for my taste and was glad that I had the double patties for that extra bite. The meat was cooked 100% which was excusable since after all, it’s a fast-food burger.
 

The Fries


A burger is not a complete meal with fries!

This place has made it very obvious for the customer to see that the fries are made fresh. Behind the cashier, mounted on the wall is a device with a big plunger like handle that turns an ordinary potato into perfectly alumette cut strips before being fried in olive oil. Olive oil! Not lard, not canola oil, not peanut oil, but olive oil!

The fries were indeed very good. Golden, crispy, cooked just right. They stayed crispy throughout our meal and did not soak the paper container in grease. I found them to be just a slightly little bit over salted for my taste but I managed to finished most of my quite generous order regardless.



The Shake

To the left of the cashier and in a deliberately planned vantage point within the customers’ view sits a milk shake machine on top of a glass case full of ice cream tubs.

We could not resist.

Three flavors; vanilla, chocolate and coffee; hand-dip and made to order with choice of up to two of the ten toppings offered. I picked chocolate with Oreo cookies (right on the photo) with Tourist Tree having just a plain coffee shake (left on the photo).

The shakes were very decent. They were made with Blue Bunny Ice Cream which I have seen not seen before in this area. I am not 100% sure but I do not think Blue Bunny is organic. Regardless, the shake was great with the meal. It was thick, but not the kind of thick that would make the veins on the side of your head pop while sucking it through a straw. Its sweetness was a nice balance to the saltiness from the fries, and it also served as a nice dessert for us, although I did detect one or two pieces of small ice crystals in my shake.

I also noticed some chocolate chip oatmeal pecan cookies in either larger or smaller sizes sitting on the counter. They looked very tempting and were supposedly baked on premise but I had enough sense [for once] to restrain myself this time not to touch them.

Sitting next to the cookies was a small container for the Burger Card. One punch for every burger patty purchased. One free patty for every seven purchased. We already have three punches just for this visit. This could be dangerous!

We were impressed that somebody came out to check on our meal while we were eating. I told him that Elevation Burger reminded us a bit of In-N-Out but he said that it was actually modeled after Five Guys.

We liked our meal. The burger was nowhere near a Good Dog, a Rouge, or even a Sketch Burger. However, for what it was; it was a very decent fast food burger made with better ingredients and definitely tasted a head above its competitors. It was also one third the price of a Rouge burger. Given that I have not found an acceptable place for a decent burger on the Main Line yet, this could be a stop for one of those absolute emergency burger fix (at least in the ‘better” fast food category). If not, it could still be a dependable place for some good fries and decent shakes (although I may just bring an airplane size bottle of vodka to add some extra flavor to my shake next time).


* Speaking of industrial agriculture. God made cows to graze freely on open land eating natural grass. Why are they now standing shoulder to shoulder in their own feces, getting fat from synthetic hormones and eating corn out of a feeding trough all day in enclosed feed lots? A food that they were not born to eat! I shall step off my soap box now.