LBS: A Burger Joint

You know the burger's gone uptown when the fast-food chains start duking it out over who's got the bigger, better, juicier -- Black Angus! -- version of this iconic food that holds a rightfully exalted place in the American culinary pantheon.

And isn't the burger the perfect food for our times? It's cheap -- at least in relation to another of the country's culinary icons, the steak -- it's quintessentially American, which ought to satisfy all of those patriotic twinges, and it's enough of a blank canvas that it can be configured to suit almost any taste and to reflect just about any culture that has found a niche in our national melting pot.

But the burger isn't just a burger anymore, and hooray for that. Today, you can find burgers with almost any imaginable vegetable, almost any imaginable cheese, at comfortable restaurants that manage to serve them without possessing drive-through windows.

LBS: A Burger Joint is one of the new breed. No pretensions here -- not with a name like that -- besides serving good burgers the way you want them, with a few subtle suggestions just in case you should need help. LBS's Do It Yourself option offers beef, free-range turkey or homemade veggie burgers, in single, double or triple configurations ($6.25 to $11.50, depending on size). You can get them with American, white cheddar, brie, goat, Gruyere, blue, pepperjack, Swiss or provolone cheese, and with toppings that include Ford-and-Chevy lettuce and tomato but also alfalfa sprouts, grilled wild mushrooms or a fried egg. And sauces, eight of them, including herb mayo and barbecue ketchup.

We were feeling lazy, though, and decided to leave the driving to LBS, which meant The Perfect Burger ($13.25) and The LBS Steak Sandwich ($14.75).

First, the burger; who could resist a name like that? They're setting themselves up with this one, though, because, naturally, perfect it wasn't. Oh, it was cooked medium-rare as ordered, it did have a good bit of crunchy frissee and some quite nice red onion marmalade, but the bacon was thick, which is normally a good thing but a little tough to break through when you're eating a medium-rare burger, and the other flavors overwhelmed the Gruyere, which is quite a challenge with Gruyere. Make no mistake; this was a very good burger. But perfect? Mais non. But like I said, they're setting themselves up with this one.

On the side: a huge tangle of fries, hot and slightly crispy.

The steak sandwich was quite nice, with wonderfully tender beef and in-house-pickled shallots, a great accent you don't find everyday. And with blue cheese, a mild horseradish steak sauce and grilled ciabatta that was sturdy enough to support it all, it was very successful. We paid $2 extra for onion rings instead of fries with this one, and they were thick-cut, crisp and hot.

We had started with the warm sourdough pretzel sticks ($5.75) and the Fried Cheeskurds ($7, and their spelling, not mine). The former were largish, just-soft enough nubs of pretzel-roll dough, the mustard an apt (if traditional) accompaniment. The fondue, though, was a bit of a disappointment not because it was merely a warm cheese dip -- we expected that -- but because the cheese was so excessively mild as to initially seem pasty. Surely with a foil as neutral as these pretzels, a cheese with a bit more personality is in order.

The curds were good, possessed of the more resilient texture that characterizes these pre-cheese bits of cheese, and our only disappointment here was the promised tomato relish. We'd expected something cold with kind of a sweet-and-sour thing going on; what we got was basically a chunky marinara.

Service throughout was OK, though a mocha Adult Milkshake ($7.50) took so long to come out, we would've thought it had been forgotten if our waitress didn't keep mentioning it. The entrees came out too soon after our starters, and when a restaurant has nine of them on its list, you know it's serious about them, so it ought to time things better.

We liked the decor in general -- sort of old-brick and antiquish -- but the booths were, as the hostess warned, a little weird: OK once you got in them, but getting in and out was kind of a challenge.

The burgers weren't the only thing that reminded us of the recession.

Las Vegas Review-Journal reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at 383-0474 or e-mail her at hrinella@ reviewjournal.com.