Campus Eats: UBurger

Photos by Amy Laskowski

If you don’t venture beyond the GSU for lunch, you must be getting tired of the same deli sandwiches day after day. To satisfy that primal urge for a burger — a real burger — head up Comm Ave or down to Kenmore Square until you find the meat-eater’s haven known as UBurger.

Maybe the best thing about UBurger is that it uses fresh, not frozen, beef (McDonald’s, take note). Their tagline, “Above All Burgers,” doesn’t do the place justice.

The two locations near campus — in Kenmore Square at 636 Beacon St. and at 1022 Comm Ave — offer slight variations on the theme. The new Comm Ave site is smaller than the flagship, but both have corrugated metal walls, cozy tables, and a blackboard menu. The new restaurant allows owners Nick Kesaris (CAS’98) and Spiro Kouvlis more prep room to hand-cut fries and meat. Twice a day they make a run to the Kenmore location, good stuff in hand.

UBurger makes burgers to order, so feel free to substitute. Want the Cowboy Burger with no BBQ sauce? No problem.

Being a bacon fanatic (my motto: bacon makes everything taste better), I recommend the Yuppie Burger ($5.50), featuring Swiss cheese, grilled mushrooms, and, yes, bacon. But don’t stick with the script; there are myriad options to build your own, using a wheat roll, banana pepper rings, pepperjack cheese, and guacamole, to name a few.

If you’re looking for what some might consider a healthier option, there’s always chicken. The Hot Chick ($5.00) — UBurger’s name, not mine — is a grilled chicken sandwich with hot sauce, lettuce, tomatoes, and bleu cheese dressing. You can cut carbs by getting your burger without a bun.

And in a sure sign of the inclusive times, vegetarians are not left out. For an extra 35 cents, a veggie burger, made of oats, brown rice, chickpeas, cheddar cheese, and “other vegetarian ingredients,” according to the staff, can be substituted for any beef burger. “The texture is pleasing,” a non-meat-eating friend tells me. “It’s not crunchy or hard, yet it isn’t mushy, like other veggie burgers I’ve tried.”

The fries alone ($2.50) are worth the trip. Made and cut fresh, they’re seasoned with salt and pepper (some say a little too heavily, but perfect for me). If you go to the Kenmore location, try the onion rings ($2.75). The sweet onions, with their light, crispy batter, are addictive. Warning: the Comm Ave location doesn’t serve onion rings because there isn’t enough room to make them — a touchy subject among diners. “A demotion!” grumbles another friend.

Looking for something else? UBurger also has all-beef hot dogs, a.k.a. UDogs ($2.75), and USalads ($4.75 to $6.50).

These tasty treats need to be washed down with something. You could opt for a run-of-the-mill fountain Coke, but I recommend a frappe ($5.00). They come in the standard flavors — vanilla, chocolate, strawberry — as well as some unconventional ones — black and white, mint Oreo, and Reese’s.

A menu can be found here. Check out the eat @ bu facebook page, or the Campus Eats page, for more options

Amy Laskowski can be reached at amlaskow@bu.edu.

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