Best at Basic
Local Five Guys co-owner Jim Richards wants to talk about the basics: burger basics, that is. Step inside any local Five Guys, any time of day, and what else is there to talk about?
The red-and-white-checkered eatery sizzles and steams with nonstop burger orders, and it all begins with a biweekly beef delivery. Five Guys’ beef arrives in 20-pound boxes, and it arrives fresh — never frozen. “We don’t even have a freezer in the store,” Jim said. “Most people can’t believe it when we say that.”
In fact, Five Guys has only a cooler, where it stores whole fruits and vegetables to be hand-sliced for toppings throughout the day.
Getting back to the burger — after staff receives the beef bounty, it sets to making patties. First, the beef is divided into nearly quarter-pound hunks, which are then rolled and flattened. The patties are stored in a cool drawer in Five Guys’ open kitchen, where they never wait for long.
“As soon as a customer is in line we ask them, ‘How many patties?’” Jim said. “If we know the customer, we’ll pull out their patties as soon as they walk through the door.”
Each burger is cooked over 350 F until it is “well-juicy,” Jim said. The buns are toasted on Five Guys’ flat-top grill, and the goal is to get customers their food in under eight minutes, he said. That’s a rather impressive goal if you think about it.
While the restaurant’s ingredients are simple, its process is rather pain-staking. I didn’t even touch on the potatoes, which arrive whole and are sliced one-by-one before they’re soaked in the sink to rinse away the starch and secure that crisp, dense fry flavor. Yes, Five Guys’ fries — that is a story for another time.