No drive thru. Gotta go in and order or there is an option to preorder but who does that. There's a short line on this fine Sunday evening. Took about 15 minutes from pull-in to the parking lot to leaving with the goods. Ordered a hamburger, a cheese burger and "regular" fries and 2 regular dispenser drinks. The lady was with me. The order was prepared in plain sight although most folks don't pay any attention to this feature. I did notice that all the food preparers were wearing latex gloves and hats. That's good.
The order goes into a brown paper bag regardless of where the food will be eaten. We took the eats to the PI marina and watched the bay boat traffic and Darrel and Darrelet looking for beach glass. If one elected to chow at 5 Guys they would find it quite loud and barren with very little chance for a private meal. You can pork down as many "free" peanuts as you can eat while waiting. Not sure who sweeps up the peanut shell mess.
The burgers are wrapped in tin foil. The "regular" burger is actually 2 patties. The "small" burger only has 1 patty. This is perhaps a ploy to the unaware customer. Most people would simply order a burger thinking it's a regular 1 patty affair like in all the other burger places. A "small" implies perhaps a kid's meal size. With the 2 patties it's quite a good sized burger. I ordered mine with lettuce, tomato and mustard. The burger cost is $3.99. The small is $2.99.
The buns are the sesame style, aka, Mac look alikes. Nothing special with them. Overall the burger is good but I did drip several grease spots onto my just washed favorite summer shirt. The fries are fried in peanut oil. This is advertized as natural and without cholesterol. Unfortunately oil is oil with respect to calories per gram. They are very oily and are very bad unless one has rusted knee joints. They always throw in a few handfuls of extras into the bag to make it a very large order. I'm guessing they playing the pshyco game again having folks think they're getting an extra special deal. All they're getting is more very greasy fries that oil up the bag and everything inside it. The bag got so oily I had to dump the fries out and discard the bag because it had started to get oil all over the car console and me.
The drinks are normal fare. Although unlike many dispensers that use local water this did not have any flouride flavor. The cups are the ubiquitous waxed paper kind. I prefer the styrofoam style as they keep the drink cold longer. There is an environmental downside to the styrofoam but these folks walked over that line when they opted for the tin foil burger wrappers.
We eat the goods and both end up with grease spotted shirts.
Until I get futher into the study my contigent ratings are:
- convenience of buying - ok
- time from order to meal - slower than drive thru but not as slow as a sitdown
- presentation of meal - that tin foil needs to go and replaced with something more green and less shine
- cost - average, although I felt duped by the labeling
- bun - average, no differentiation over Mac's, the King, and little Wendy
- condiments - at least you can have it your way
- drinks - average, no differentiation
- eat-in ambiance is too sparse and open. Even most Mac's have booths.
- fries - no more than once per year and one needs to be very, very hungry. The greasy bag is a real problem!
Overall rating: 3 barf bags.
The barf bag scale is 1 to 5 with 1 being heaven on earth fare and 5 being bear bait.
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