Samantha Ling

After our walk around Santa Barbara, Jenn suggested we eat at a place called Umami Burger. She’d heard great things about it and since The Hubs and I love burgers, we were all for it. We couldn’t actually find it at first. The closer we got to it, the more office space we saw. I even busted out the iPhone GPS unit and we were like, it’s supposed to be RIGHT HERE. OMG, there are no signs. The only thing we saw were these lip looking things on the window

There was nothing saying Umami Burger anywhere! But luckily, there were people already standing around waiting for it to open. But because there was no name, I thought, OMG, what kind of place is this that they ONLY have this icon. Like they think they’re so awesome that they don’t need to pub their name anywhere. But you know, in an attempt to not judge things before I try it, I refrained from poopoo-ing it.

(As a total aside that is not connected to anything about my trip, there is a video called “Everybody Poops” that I found insanely funny. It’s a Bad Lip Reading song based on Black Eyed Peas’ Boom Boom Pow. Make sure you have earphones on if you’re not alone. It’s nothing bad, but they do say poop a lot.)

So Umami Burger in Santa Monica felt like it was uber trendy. You know I hate places like that because I always feel like the food is too expensive and not good at all. There was butcher paper on the tables with the log stamped on it and you know, I was just put off by the whole lips with no name thing.

I asked the waitress which burger she liked and she said she liked the truffle burger, so I ordered that. The Hubs ordered the SoCal Burger. Jenn ordered the veggie version, which she talks about on her blog. Chris East got (I think) the Port and Stilton burger. All their burgers are cooked to a medium rare, but they were a little bit more on the rare side. I asked for mine to be medium well and it turned out perfect. So make sure you do specify or it may come out a little bit more rare than you’d like.

We also ordered two different kinds of fries because we were fry monsters! We ordered the thin fries as well as the smushed fries. The smushed fries are these little round potatoes that they basically smash with the spatula and fry. They are very good. The skin is still on them. I would suggest this one if you want the fries. We also ordered umami ketchup and garlic aioli for the fries. They don’t have regular ketchup, but something they made on their own. It’s got a nice kick to it, so I suggest this one. The aoili didn’t have enough garlic for me.

As for the burgers, I’d skip the truffle burger as there wasn’t enough truffle flavor to be worth the extra $2. But the burger was good nonetheless. I enjoyed The Hubs’ burger though, so next time, if we get to go again, I would get his burger. It was nice and juicy without it dripping with grease and it was just yummy.

So this is a good lesson for me. Don’t exnay something just because it looks uber trendy because you might be surprised. The food might actually be good.

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal