FOUR BURGERS (705 Mass Ave, Cambridge, 617.441.5444) has the catchy slogan “Which One Are You?” on their staff T-shirts. Evidently Freud and Jung have left the building and everyone can be described as either beef, vegetarian, turkey, or salmon. I’m a beef with cheese ($7), which is a little pricier than most revival burgers but rather delicious. It comes with real cheddar, a sesame bun, and predictable trimmings, and doesn’t have much char flavor. Shoestring fries, check. Brushed-steel chairs, check. Deadly chocolate milkshakes, a plus. Irony number one: this space used to house a restaurant named for the master faster, M.K. Gandhi. Irony number two: the Four Burgers owner also owns the Blarney Stone in Dorchester, home of a disqualified bistro burger (actually four micro cheeseburgers served as an appetizer, $9) that I actually prefer to the one served here.
FLIPPIN’ BURGERS (216 Sumner Street, Newton, 617.795.2022) is the sleeper of this category, a place started by three Asian-American partners in a too-small location barely visible off Beacon Street. But a sandwich sign out front said to “Try our tasty burgers,” and I’m glad I did. This place is so amateurish, it doesn’t even have brushed-steel chairs. So amateurish it uses only Angus beef. So amateurish it’s trying to market its special sauce (honey-mustard-mayonnaise with a real kick) out of a six-seat storefront, with maybe three more seats on the bench outside if it isn’t raining. So amateurish it serves the sides of caramelized onions and mushrooms (75 cents each) cold. The cheeseburger ($6.65) is a nice 1/3-pound size, and while the Angus beef is a little too refined to fight that sauce, it’s still a juicy burger, a little rounder like the Bartley’s classic. The default side is very good onion rings, a nice change from French fries (75 cents extra), which aren’t great here. I think maybe the grill guy speaks a little Chinese at home.
Bar burgers
When I was a kid, we couldn’t go into bars, so a bar burger could never be a hometown burger. I suspect they weren’t that tasty, either. But now they are. As a class, bar burgers are bigger, better tasting, and cost more than the others reviewed here. The suspension of health-food anxieties probably helps.
The DRUID PUB (1357 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, 617.497.0965) by day is a quiet place. The cheeseburger ($10) includes super steak-cut fries, with perhaps a little too much flake salt. The patty is a solid half-pound, also salted, with an outstanding grilled onion. A Brooklyn Lager ($5) has fewer calories than a milkshake. Possibly the grill guy had to learn Gaelic in school.
The JOSHUA TREE BAR & GRILL (1316 Comm Ave, Allston, 617.566.6699) is never a quiet place. There’s background music, a loud young crowd, and a PA system over which someone runs a trivia contest. Visually, we had TVs tuned to two different baseball games, a poker tournament, and boxing. With the PA system blaring, this large room is kind of like a high-school cafeteria, only with beer, TVs, and higher seating. I wouldn’t have looked for a burger here, except that right on its sign, in foot-high letters, the Joshua Tree claims to have Boston’s best burgers. Assertions like that have to be investigated. The cheeseburger is “The Patriot” ($6.99) — football, not political. The patty has an odd but familiar cheap-beef taste I don’t favor, but that vanishes in the white bun with the red onion, pink tomato, and my addition of ketchup. It’s a solid half-pound. The accidental sweet-potato fries, not so easy to do well, are quite enjoyable. Service isn’t great, and it would have taken a loud long time to get an order of regular French fries, so Joshua Tree — which has a second location in Davis Square — gets to rest on the sweet-potato fries, unless it makes claims about them on the marquee.
