LBS Burger

The family goes out to eat nearly every Sunday. Visiting the same restaurants can get old after a while, although every now and then you can discover something new at an old favorite restaurant. (If you haven't tried it, go for the fried chicken at Memphis Championship Barbecue. I don't really like fried chicken but theirs is phenomenal. And it's served family style with all you can eat mashed potatoes, green beans, chicken dumplings, corn and rolls. Oh My Gosh good!)

So we try to discover new places, with varying degrees of success. After reading a friend's blog, we decided to try LBS Burger at the Red Rock Station casino. She proclaimed it the best burger in the city, even better than Burger Bar (Hubert Keller's restaurant) in the Mandalay Bay. Now when it comes to burgers, I'm a bit of a purist, so my favorite burger in Las Vegas is at a dive bar near my house. While they are a little pricier than when I first started going, you can still get a 1/3 pound burger with fries for less than eight bucks. And it's a great burger, hand pattied with all my favorite fixings (again, I'm a traditionalist, I like lettuce, tomato, pickles, onions and all the condiments) and it's on a toasted bun, which for me is what takes a burger to the next level. I would eat the burgers at this place more often if they didn't also have the best chili cheese fries in Vegas. Trust me when I say this causes no end of internal conflict.

So when someone tells me that they loved a burger place, I'm a tad skeptical. I'm not one for lots of exotic toppings or patties made from exotic animals. Beef, bun, cheese and my traditional fixings and I'm happy. But the pictures on her blog looked yum-tastic and we needed to get out of our rut so we decided to try it. The decor at LBS is southern Gothic meets rock n' roll. Black lace on the windows, furniture that would look right at home in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland and way too loud music playing. (It was great music but just too loud). The economy has thinned out restaurant crowds so we got right in.

What to choose? The menu is descriptively delicious which makes you want everything. Burgers aren't cheap, averaging around eleven dollars. They did have sliders on the menu which come in three, six or twelve packs. After asking the waitress the size of the sliders (we have been to restaurants where the slider was the size of a regular burger) we decided to share a twelve order and get a few sides to share. We chose chili-cheese fries, onion rings and fried cheese curds (thank goodness casinos are required to have defibrillators on hand!) You can customize your sliders so we got six with American cheese and six with white cheddar. They come with fried onions, pickles and "LBS sauce" which is the same ubiquitous mayo-ketchup mix you get everywhere else.

The sliders were on shiny egg buns and a nice size of about three inches in diameter. Their meat is "dry aged 21 days" and while I don't know that dry aging has as much of an impact in a burger as it does in a steak, the burgers were nice and beefy.
The onion rings were some of the best I've ever had, large, well battered, shatteringly crisp and oh-so-delicious. The onions inside were nicely soft but didn't just fall out. (This was both good and bad, as I wanted a couple to fall out so I could give my brother the shell and eat the onion myself. he like onion rings but his digestive system doesn't like onions so I try to 'shell' a few so he can have some of the taste without the distress. We are kind of like Jack Sprat and his sister - yes, I know the story is Jack Sprat and his wife, but he had to have someone help him before he got married, didn't he?) The fries underneath the chili were good, but the chili itself was too sweet with too much cinnamon (great for you Cincinnati chili lovers, but I'm a Texas red kind of girl so this needed more heat, less sweet) although the roasted jalapenos and sour cream were a nice touch.

Cheese curds are a delicacy that some love and some hate. I personally like the 'squeaky cheese' and try to stop in the Cache Valley store every time we drive to Salt Lake to buy some. They are best very fresh so the store connected to the dairy is the right place to buy them. But even if the cheese curds at LBS weren't 'squeaky' fresh, they were delicious none the less. Deep fried cheese isn't high on my list because it usually involves mozzarella, a very stretchy cheese but fairly bland in flavor. The white cheese curds at LBS were nicely stretchy but with more flavor than mozzarella. The only downside was that the "tomato relish" on the side was really just a marinara. I just ate them plain.

Desserts seemed pretty standard except for the daily pie. When I inquires to that day's flavor and was told it was peach raspberry, we signed up for two (they are small, just about 3-1/2 inches so the waitress explained we would need two for the five of us. Why they get skimpy at dessert is beyond me, when all their other portion sizes were huge.) It comes out warm, with vanilla ice cream. It had a lovely flaky bottom crust and a crunchy sweet oatmeal streusel topping. The tangy raspberries were a perfect foil to the sweet peaches. Lovely and delicious and even though we were stuffed from lunch there was no pie left over (which proves my theory that you ALWAYS have room for dessert.)

So, best burger in Vegas? Not really. But a good burger with some good sides, yes. Besides the loud music, the only other downfall was the price. Even with us sharing everything and having only water to drink, the bill came to over eighty dollars for five people. Not exactly budget friendly. But we will probably return, at least for the onion rings and pie!