Albany's Bronze Burger Winner 2018

Welcome to our 3-part blog series on our Top 3 Burgers of Albany!!!  This has been a fun, interesting and long journey!  You can’t just eat burgers every day and slap out a declaration of ‘Best Burger in Albany’.  We respect our arteries.  As of the publication of this blog, we had not heard back from our top 3, but if and when we do, we will update our posts to include quotes and info from them directly.

We took our time with this project, carefully rated the burgers, in some cases went back more than once to be sure and, of course, had Things 2, 3, 4, & 5 do a blind taste test of our final three for you.  So yes, you will get the kid’s perspective as well.  This was definitely a family effort!!!! 

We will be sharing one blog with you each week until we reach #1!!!  Take the journey with us each week; visit and enjoy these burgers and the quality put into them!  Please keep in mind that we love ALL of these burgers and we will repeatedly enjoy them all! BUT…  they had to be ranked, so we got down and did it.

So let’s get started with our #3 - The Bronze Burger of Albany:

FIRST BURGER!!!!!

What we love about the First Burger:

The Iron Woman with a 50/50 patty

We just can’t get enough of a burger restaurant that uses grass-fed beef.  The flavor of grass-fed beef is just…amazing.  We love knowing our family is eating healthy meat, that is probably our #1 goal with every meal we make and order while dining out (ideally). There is also nowhere else in town that offers the option for a 50% Beef / 50% Bacon patty or a 100% Buffalo patty!

The Smoke Stack

The local factor is huge for us, we love supporting local businesses!  This restaurant is locally owned, and located in our beloved growing downtown district that is quickly becoming a foodie paradise.  (no complaints here, Albany!)  They also use local ingredients whenever possible.  The produce on the burgers is always so fresh; it’s like eating a burger made at home.  (and we make some mean burgers)  Local growers, bakers…..this restaurant supports our valley, our state, and we support them!

Since First Burger is (obviously) a burger-centric restaurant, their variety is to die for.  Thing #5 loves their milkshakes, I love their fry sauce (dreamy - try it with the onion rings!) and their specials are incredible.  So many burgers to try, so little time!!!!  They know burgers and they know how to play with food…a perfect pair!

The Thing Review:

The Iron Woman, Assembled

The overall consensus among our Things was that First Burger was their FIRST choice!  Yes, friends, these burgers are not only kid-approved, they are kid-preferred!  Keep in mind, they tasted them blindly and went on flavor alone.  So be sure to take the kids with you, because they are going to LOVE these burgers!  Bonus:  we mentioned the grass-fed beef, right?

We award First Burger our Bronze Burger Statue!  So this week, while you wait for the announcement of our #2-rated burger, head downtown and try a First Burger!!!  Take the family, order take-out…whatever works for you,  but throw them some love because they are doing grass-fed burgers RIGHT!

The Fatty Melt - 50/50 patty between
2 grilled cheese sandwiches!

Congratulations, First Burger!  We’ll be back!









The Silver Burger winner has been announced as well, check it out HERE!

Burger Queen - Albany, OR (Review)

This restaurant has been sitting empty for so long that when a new establishment opened - it was quite a buzz. Enter Burger Queen!

We are always happy to try new restaurants in our little town, it's exciting to watch the food culture explode here! So we decided to explore this new burger joint and see what they are offering we Albany-ites.

To say the menu is very simple is an overstatement. If I had to choose one word to describe the menu it would be: minimal. I don't even need to say more than: hamburger, cheeseburger, bacon cheeseburger, fries. Because those are literally your only options. You can order extra patties, extra bacon, etc. But those are your main choices. In a basket with a drink or a lone burger.  We pondered whether or not this was what they were striving for but we couldn't actually tell what this restaurant is trying to be.  Maybe they're just at a jumping off point?  Hard to know.

Brownie ordered the Bacon Cheeseburger and I had just a plain cheeseburger. We got the basket for the full experience and just filled our cups with water. Not soda fans.

Our food was served in tin baskets with a generous side of fries; there were very few condiments available.  We grabbed handfuls of mustard and ketchup packets and started in on our burgers.

The veggies were fresh, but they seemed to take up more room in my  bun than the actual burger did.  Size-wise the buns were comparable to our recent visit to Cheesy Stuffed Burgers but there was considerably less meat in the patty with much less flavor.  Brownie was disheartened with the thin bacon ring on his burger, I was less than thrilled with what looked to be a Kraft Single slice on our burgers instead of real cheese.

When we had finished our burgers with a shrug and a 'Meh..' we started emptying condiment packets into our basket to devour our fries.  The fries looked as if they were real cut potatoes, as Burger

Queen boasts.  They felt cold, however and were a bit soggy and chewy as if they'd been sitting out for quite a while.

When we finished our meal, I can honestly say we were sustained and no longer really hungry.  Satisfied?  Physically, yes.  Impressed? No. Better than McDonald's?  Yes.  I can't publish the word that Brownie uses to describe what we ate this evening, but suffice to say it's not a positive one.

The best I  can hope for is that this restaurant will expand its menu and branch out a bit more, but it doesn't seem likely.  They would be wise to ditch the burgers and buy a bank of blenders, selling smoothies to the local high school kids.  They were honestly hoping for a Jamba Juice anyway.

If you're stuck on the street corner in West Albany and can't get past Elm street, this will fill you up.  Otherwise, keep driving.

We gave Burger Queen 2 1/2 stars on our Brownifer scale; it was clean and the staff was polite.  But it wasn't hard to figure out why it was so slow on a weekday evening.  It pains us to give a bad review, we really want to like the places we visit.  Unfortunately, this just didn't do it for us.

The Juicy Jennifer

Before you gasp at the title of this blog, let's remember the original invention of the cheese-stuffed burger patty: The Juicy Lucy.  Food has such a rich history in this country, it's always fun to learn something new!

We just received our order of grass-fed beef last week and I know Brownie has been itching to thaw some of it and get to the grill.  Now, we have an amazing food truck near us called Cheesy Stuffed Burgers that we haven't had a chance to try yet.  Rest assured, we will!  But tonight we decided to dig into that delicious beef and try our own version.

Brownie topped his with pickles, roasted red pepper and mustard and toasted his buns.  The hamburger buns.  I am not a fan of toasted buns, so I kept my Juicy Jennifer's buns soft and used pickles, mustard, horseradish and ketchup.  They were delicious!

I reminded Brownie we couldn't call it a Juicy Lucy because well .... this is something different.  So he told me, "It's my Juicy Jennifer!"  We giggled and laughed and munched on our burgers .... but it's a great name for them!

Burger and Fries

I was craving burgers ... it happens sometimes. :-)  With three kids in the house for the weekend, we decided to grill some burgers.  Now, when we grill burgers I have to tell you that we use 100% grass-fed beef from the happiest cows you'll ever find.  We buy big orders of ground beef from Bauer Natural Beef right here in Oregon.  They're amazing people and their beef is OUT OF THIS WORLD!  Once you try it, you'll never buy any other beef again.

I do have to say that burgers in this house are always topped with Tillamook Cheddar Cheese, it's an Oregon tradition.  We just don't buy any other cheddar if we have a choice.  Yes, the hippie supports a big corporation :-)

This particular weekend, we were blessed with home-canned pickles from one of my dear friends and ... they were an amazing addition to my burger!  Everything homemade and home-canned is just SO MUCH BETTER!!!  I am determined to try canning pickles this year!  She's inspired me.

Yes, you do in fact see french fries on that plate.  I have to say, my hippie heart hurt when I saw a bag of fries come into my kitchen.  But...three kids.  Brownie found organic french fries - can you believe it!?  I turned a blind eye and enjoyed my burger ;-)  This kids were shocked and amazed that a bag of fries came home and devoured them happily with their organic ketchup.  :-)