If there are two things I love, it’s How I Met Your Mother and beer.
Allow me to rephrase before I get smacked when I get home: if there are two things I love besides my wife, it’s How I Met Your Mother and beer.
So during last night’s episode, involving the best burger in NYC, Elizabeth declared that she wanted a burger. Immediately. I wasn’t wearing pants at the time (which was also covered in the episode, giving me yet another reason to love it) and so I promised that we’d go out to the place that had the best burger tonight. Then I set out to find where it was we were going.
Libraryman to the rescue!
The winner, by a hair, as far as I can tell is Grover’s. It gets the Yahoo local vote, one from a local blogger, something called Yelp, foodry.com and — most importantly for someone concerned with authority — the immediate vote of my boss. The issue is that it’s about half an hour from our house and has a tendency to be packed: thinking back, we tried to go here once but gave up when the place was so full we had trouble even getting our name on the board. We’ll need to check it out, but not tonight (especially because I have to be done in time to film something for Beer-O-Vision). Also, for the record, it’s cash only (which isn’t a mark against it, but is good to know going in).
Coming in second, depending on who you ask, is Sterling Place. We love Sterling Place: great food, great beer, down the street from us. As such, it was nice to see it getting recognition as the best from e:strip, Buffalo Homecoming, Buffalo Rising, Buffalo Spree and Bill Rapaport’s Restaurant Guide (with a review for Grover’s saying that Sterling is better). I’ve gotten a burger here once, but generally we come for the amazing fish fry on Fridays. Looks like we need to reconsider our orders, or at least go on non-Fridays. Also cash only, and the burgers can take up to 90 minutes depending on their crowd, but they’re very up front with both. Have another beer while you wait.
Third place came Vizzi’s, which is also fairly close. Though it won the top spot from the Buffalo News (the article itself doesn’t seem to be available, unless you have access to Lexis-Nexis like I do), my visit was marred by their poor beer selection (and from a bar, no less!). A waitress should never say ‘Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you if we have it’ unless the list is long and/or esoteric, and as Vizzi’s highlights are Sam Adams and Yuengling (in bottles; the best draft selection they have is Labatt’s)… the burger was good, at least. Cole’s also got quite a few mentions (including another from Yelp), and I’ve been meaning to check out their beer selection, but that will have to wait for another time.
I feel like a fool for not having realized that one of the city’s best burgers is sitting in the same kitchen next to our favorite fish fry, but there you have it! We’ll be heading to Sterling Place tonight, but will have to choose a weekday we aren’t busy to take the trip to Grover’s and finally see what the fuss is about.
It’s also worth noting that the locals on Twitter were absolutely useless in the compilation of this data.
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