Restaurant Review | Burger Boy Diner

Some writers conduct research in library reading rooms. Some spend their time surfing the Web. Some, I suppose, just gaze off into inner (or outer) space. But some writers — those whose pulse quickens when they hear a well-told anecdote, those who are fascinated by the sight of an old man carefully counting out change, who love to parse the rhythms of a tense back-and-forth between a tired mom and her kids — those writers are attracted to spaces where stories hang in the air, just waiting to be told and overheard, shared and twisted.
 
Those kinds of places have an atmosphere that transcends paint colors, furniture, kitschy wall hangings and the like. It’s the sort of atmosphere that can never be designed, though it can easily enough be destroyed. It’s the kind of atmosphere you’ll find at the Burger Boy Diner, the 24/7 eatery that’s been an Old Louisville fixture (under various names, including Juanita’s Burger Boy) for decades.
 
In fact, if the Coen Brothers (or Quentin Tarantino, for that matter) phoned me up and asked me where they should go to get a sense of Louisville, I’d send them to Burger Boy. If they got lucky, they might happen in at 2 a.m. on Derby morning, just in time to hear a drunken nurse start lecturing the grill man about the evils of salt (his response, “Yeah, but without any sodium in your diet, you’d probably die.”).
 
They might find Old Louisville’s Metro Council rep holding a meeting with citizens. Depending on the time of day, at any given moment, they’d likely find a mix of longtime neighborhood denizens, a cluster of hipsters, a few businesspeople, a few musicians, a few teams of workers taking a break from nearby projects.
 
It’s a cool place to hang out, really. But it’s better not to over-romanticize the place. Current owner Daniel Borsch took over in 2008, and has systematically spiffed it up over the years. The decorating scheme features Cards banners, Old Louisville signs and an eclectic mix of bumper stickers that support causes like a Free Tibet and toll-free bridges.
 
Service, always friendly in the years that I’ve been visiting, has grown increasingly reliable over time (nowadays, many of the staffers seem to stick around for a good while). And when the food is good, it represents great value — but being consistent isn’t easily achieved (unless, of course, your menu consists mostly of small, square slabs of steamed ground beef).
 
What Burger Boy does quite well is breakfast. My taste runs to fried eggs over medium, with firm whites and yolks just turning creamy — and they get that right every time. Of course it helps if you sit at the counter, where you can chat up the cook (and watch the frenzied effort required to get through a big rush).
 
They handle other breakfast staples nicely — like crisp home fries and hash browns and stuffed omelets — and quite often the cook brings your meal straight from the grill to the table.
 
Prices are low enough to comfort nearly any pocketbook. For $6.99, you can tuck into two eggs (any style — other than poached), home fries, a hefty portion of biscuits and Southern-style gravy, and bacon, ham or sausage (Beware: The cooks sometimes cook off meats in advance of a rush. I once encountered a rasher of bacon so badly overdone it could have starred as a comic book supervillain — but that’s an exception).
 
A stack of three pancakes runs $3.99; French toast (raisin bread and a cinnamon-laced batter) is $4.99; a hefty order of corned beef hash — crisp slivers of peppery corned beef, fried chunks of potato and onion — topped with a couple of eggs is $6.99 Omelets (cheese, Western, veggie, etc.) run $4.99-$8.49.
 
Count up all the burger options on the Burger Boy Diner menu and you’ll come up with 17 (caveat: That’s high counting for me; you might get a different number). There’s the signature sandwich: The Burger Boy Combo, made with two quarter-pound patties on a three-piece toasted bun with special sauce, fries and a drink ($7.99). A hamburger combo runs $4.99; a quarter-pound Bison burger runs $8.99 ($6.49 a la carte); a veggie burger is $4.99; and there are other permutations to ponder.
 
Non-burger options include a BLT ($4.49), which can be decked out with avocado ($5.49), as well as a Reuben ($5.29), chicken or tuna salad ($4.29), and a handful of dinner options (like a 10-ounce rib-eye, $11.99, and a fried shrimp dinner, $7.79).
 
And there are salads — a conventional old school chef’s salad ($5.69), and a rotating soup special ($3.49).
 
I would note that Burger Boy also offers chili ($3.49) — but not a version I can endorse. It’s meaty and thick, but a recent bowl was flat and out-of-whack — as if it were simply a ground beef soup with added beans. Even a hefty dose of supermarket chili powder would solve that problem.
 
Don’t forget to ask about desserts. There’s often a slice of good cake to be had.
 
You can email freelance restaurant critic Marty Rosen at cjdining@gmail.com.