Northbound Smokehouse & Brewpub

The Northbound Smokehouse & Brewpub is a new brewpub in the Longfellow neighborhood of South Minneapolis. They made news before their doors even opened when they offered free beer for life to early investors. Now that they're open, they're serving their house-made brews along with a full bar menu, with nearly everything, including the beer, touched by smoke.

Their burger is billed as a 7oz black angus patty served on an egg bun. Standard acoutrements are mayo, lettuce, and tomato for the $7.25 base price. I added fried onion ($0.50) and 2 slices of smoked cheddar ($1.50) to bring the grand total to $9.25. I ordered mine medium.

I had mixed impressions when it arrived. On the plus side, the thick coating of melted cheese permeated the small pile of fried onions atop the bun, and the lettuce provided was a few leaves of Bibb lettuce -- not something you normally see on a brewpub (or anywhere) burger. On the other hand, the patty itself had a distinctly 'prefab' appearance, with those squared edges that, at best, betray a burger patty made in a burger press but at worst imply something out of a Sysco truck. The cross section showed the meat was cooked very nearly to well-done -- nowhere near the medium requested.

Still, it's the taste that matters. And again, a mixed bag. The beef was decently seasoned, for the most part, but a bit on the dry side and not particularly distinctive on its own. The cheese, when tasted alone, had a nice smokiness to it, but it was hard to detect that flavor in the whole ensemble. The fried onions, though, were great -- they were slightly undercooked so they still had a little bit of that raw onion bite, in both flavor and texture, along with the sweetness of grilled onion. And the bun was fan-frickin'-tastic. Definitely the best bun I've had in a long while here in the Twin Cities -- extremely fresh, a little sweet, tough enough not to fall apart in your hands but soft enough to not interfere with the burger eating experience (I'm looking at you, Rye Deli onion bialy bun), and moist without being soggy.

In the end, though, the bun's perfection wasn't enough to overcome the more fundamental issue with the burger -- the meat's just average flavor and it's overcooked-ness. If you're here getting a beer, the burger is an ok choice, but I'd probably choose something else next time -- like maybe the waffle-batter-dipped fried chicken sandwich, which my friend said was quite good, and is served on the same awesome egg bun.

Northbound Smokehouse & Brewpub

2716 East 38th Street

Minneapolis, MN 55406

(612) 328-1450

Town Hall Brewery

Town Hall Brewery in the Seven Corners area of the West Bank (across the street from Republic) is, I believe, one of Minneapolis' best-loved brewpubs. In addition to their wide variety of house-brewed beers (and a small selection from other breweries), they have a fairly extensive menu of standard pub fare such as wings, steaks, a variety of salads and sandwiches, and, of course, burgers.

Their standard burger is a 1/2-lb of meat cooked medium well served with lettuce, tomato, and pickles (which I requested be omitted). To this I added cheddar cheese and fried onions (not sure if I was going to get pan-fried/caramelized onions or deep-fried onions -- either would have been fine!), and I requested my burger be cooked medium instead of medium well. Served with a side of fries, the addition of cheese and onions pushed the total up to an entirely reasonable $8.50.

The burger arrived looking pretty good -- a nice big hunk of meat with a piece of cheddar draped and melted nicely on top. Sitting on top of the cheese was a small pile of caramelized onions. The top bun was very lightly toasted, and I assume that it was the same for the lower bun (its state was harder to determine due to the confounding factor of having had a piece of cooked meat sitting atop it). The toppings were sparse -- a single small leaf of green-leaf lettuce and two small-but-thick tomato slices, barely big enough to cover half the area of the generous patty. And, sadly, two pickle slices which I promptly discarded. The meat appeared to be cooked somewhere on the border of medium and medium-well, to my eye.

The bad: The meat was way underseasoned. Good flavor, but seemingly no salt at all added to the whole affair. And while it wasn't dry, it seemed...inconsistently juicy -- some bites were better than others. On the other hand, the fried onions actually weren't completely cooked until limp, giving the burger a little textural bite. And the bun was excellent -- fresh but not too soft, a little sweet, and with maybe a hint of whole grain taste to it. A far cry from the low-rent bun at Merlin's Rest.

This burger would benefit greatly from the addition of bacon and...barbecue sauce -- which is conveniently available as their Seven Corners Burger, using Town Hall's own oatmeal stout barbecue sauce! I'd probably choose this one over competitor Republic's offerings.

Town Hall Brewery

1430 South Washington Avenue

Minneapolis, MN 55454

(612) 339-8696