This place is much more of a hole in the wall than you'd imagine. I parked right out front, and I…read morestill had a hard time finding it. A guy from my running group asked me which way it was, and I was like, "Uh, I think it's that way." A few places on this strip all have similar awnings.
I thought I was lucky finding such a good spot. By the time I was done with my run, maybe an hour later, all of Clayton was an absolute ghost town. It makes me wonder what they'd have to put here to get people to visit Clayton during the evening, a 7 Brew?
Inside is more along the lines of a bar, with a number of beers on tap and decor that may have been purchased from a Kohl's. I appreciated the way they had the beers on tap written on the wall in ginormous fonts, and I'm sure the elderly are similarly appreciative. Sometimes you ask these waiters what beers they have on tap and they act like they're doing you a favor by listing them. I asked this hillbilly they've got waiting tables at the Syberg's over on Dorsett what beers they have on tap, and he just said they have 30 of them. Uh, thanks? I wonder if he counted them.
I went with the 4 Hands Incarnation, which I have at least once a week, because I get it for free. It seemed less "high gravity" than it does when you get it in the tall cans.Hmm...
Usually, my move at these burger places is to order a bacon cheeseburger or a specialty burger that has bacon on it. 5 Star had such a burger listed first on their menu, making my choice easy enough. I toyed with the idea of ordering the Green Chile Cheeseburger, but not seriously. I wasn't sure what the green chiles would taste like, and what if they turned out to be gross? The Blue Ribbon Burger comes with bacon, port-braised onions and Gorgonzola cheese, along with LTOP.
No, that's not a typo. You get thinly sliced red onions in addition to the port-braised onions. It feels weirdly generous of them, even though they're just onions, and all the fresh toppings are of a seemingly high quality. I was more ambivalent about the toppings specific to the Blue Ribbon Burger. I didn't dislike them, but I was less impressed by them than I would have expected. The bacon was good, but it was in crumbles and I think I would have liked it more if it were in thick, crispy strips. No Diddy. The cheese was either not flavorful enough or in not abundant enough quantity to be much of a factor. The onions, on the other hand, provided a nice flavor kick--less tart than I expected, more along the lines of the onions in a french onion soup.
The fries were kinda whatever. They were good, being french fries and all, but not as gourmet as the menu would have you think. And they don't give you very many of them, if you get the regular serving. Weirdly, the regular serving doesn't cost much money, by Brandon-era standards, but the serving-size is decidedly skimpy. Why not just charge a normal amount and give you a normal quantity? Even the large won't exactly break the bank. I went with the small because I just wanted to see what they were like, for the sake of citizen food journalism. You're welcome.