Farm Burger offers a variety and gets it right
It was the best of burgers, it was the meh-est of burgers. At two recent Farm Burger visits, we hit burger Nirvana at one and hit the burger wall at another: How many burger places can we really manage? What sets one apart from another, sending you to Crosstown instead of to East Memphis, to Downtown instead of Germantown and so on?
When all the dust settles, will we just end up back at Huey’s and call it a day? We’ll know soon, as we’ve seen more burger places open in the past few months and we’re not done yet.
The food
Farm Burger opened in Crosstown Concourse in the summer with a basic menu of burgers, fries and shakes, but with turbo power. There are fries and Farm Burger fries, sweet potato fries and pimento cheese fries. And onion rings, which are pretty darn good.
There are a dozen or so burger options, not including the Build It Burger (always my favorite, no matter where), which lets you choose your own toppings and makes it easy to customize to what you want. And if red meat isn’t your thing, you can get a chicken burger. If meat isn’t for you, you can get a veggie burger made with quinoa. And if you want to do it Memphis style, you can get a ground pork patty.
Here’s the best tip to eating at Farm Burger: Get a copy of the paper menu in your hand before you order, because the one above the register is not as detailed. They’re supposed to be in a basket where you enter the line– Farm Burger is fast casual, so you order and sit – but they weren’t on our second visit.
The next tip is to be clear about whether you’re building your burger or you want a Blackboard Burger. If you ask for a chicken burger, you’re likely to get one from the Blackboard section. In this case, it was a good thing as it was one of our favorite items, but we intended to order and were expecting a plain chicken burger.
Still, it was fortuitous and we ended up with a ground chicken patty topped with Gouda, a tangy kale slaw, and crisp fried onions slathered with sherry-barbecue sauce. It was a good use of toppings on the chicken and would’ve been on the pork, too.
The beef is from grass-fed cattle that is sourced regionally. And it’s good. The first burger I ate there was nothing special, cooked well past medium as I requested, but still had a nice flavor and a good texture. Not bad, but nothing to distinguish it from standard burgers around town and certainly not worthy of going up against the best ones.
The next round of burgers there were much better, cooked perfectly, with a tender texture that comes from hand-forming a patty and not over-handling it. My only complaint is that the burgers could’ve used a bit more salt before they hit the griddle. (And that I paid $2 for white cheddar instead of $1 because I didn’t have the paper menu in my hand; you don’t have to make my mistake, though.)
Fries are fresh cut and they’re not the best in town, but they’re better than many. I particularly liked the Farm Burger fries, topped with Parmesan cheese and garlic. The pimento cheese fries were too smothered, too gooey to pick up with our fingers. The onion rings are right on, fresh and crisp, not skinny and not fat. You can bite in one and get a bite, not a whole piece of onion slipping out.
We ordered a chocolate milkshake, which was very chocolatey and not too thick, and an adult float made with Wiseacre’s Gotta
Get Up to Get Down and vanilla ice cream. Don’t knock it ’til you try it; you might just end up surprised like I did and find that it’s a nice flavor combo.
The lunch deal, by the way, is a bargain: $8.95 for a Build It Burger with fries and a soft drink. I generally drink water, but folks with me were disappointed that soft drinks come in a can and no one was given a cup to drink from.
The service and such
Farm Burger catches this but they’re not the only offender: Please quit serving me food in a basket, people. I want a plate, and it’s not too much to ask. At least Farm Burger has a theme going with the wire “chicken” basket and doesn’t use a plastic one, but it’s still hard to eat from, hard to cut a burger in half, and it’s messy.
As it’s fast casual, you stand in line, place your order and take your seat to wait for your food. It came quickly, but requests for knives and spoons (for the float) took a bit. There are Mason jars with forks on each table, but ours was empty.
I like the space, a rustic mix of booths, tables and and bar-height tables all in an open area.