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    Restaurant Review: Stack City Burger Bar

    The 670 Cap in the Short North is looking more and more like the Hyde Park Cap. The locale has been good for the organization. Hyde Park has installed its signature steak house, a small plate stop (Eleven), a fish joint (Black Point), and now there’s one more addition: Stack City Burger Bar.

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    The super good news about Stack City is that it’s comparatively affordable. Not in the five-dollar-sub sense of the word, but it’s affordable for a Hyde Park establishment where patrons can drop $80 on a Wagyu steak. In comparison, burgers at Stack City run about $10 a go.

    On the down side, Stack City is nothing terribly new. Gourmet burgers have been around for a while. It’s another gourmet burger place.

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    All the same, people seem to like hamburgers. Heck, the low-brow sort have been supporting executive salaries at McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s for decades. If not novel, Stack City’s entries are well made burgers. Case in point: the Philly ($8.50) is built around a dense, meaty burger that’s topped with a miraculously tidy pile of savory shaved sirloin, grilled onions and peppers, and enough classic cheez whiz to hold it together.

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    The same sort of compact tidiness can be found in the East Coast burger ($9). This time, the burger is topped with briny pastrami, coleslaw and gruyere. As opposed to huge and unwieldy, it’s neat and tight, delivering a quick series of balanced bites of salt and sweet.

    The burgers will be lonely on the plate, so, you’ll want some fries with that. You can score a basket of regular fries for three bucks. They’re on the artisanal side. As opposed to being crunchy, they’re peel-on and a little chewy with crispy ends and edges.

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    As an avid nacho fan, it’s the loaded fries that demand extra investigation. One of the fry concept dishes is solid, the other should be avoided. High Street Fries ($8) are loaded with pulled pork, cheez whiz and dill pickle. For those who are not philosophically opposed to cheez whiz, it’s a successful combination of textures and flavors. The pork gives it a hearty sturdiness, the cheese (cheez) and pickles give it brine and crunch.

    Meanwhile, the Disco Fries (topped with gravy and an egg for $6.50), although delicious sounding, were hard to digest in reality; perhaps because the mushroom gravy used was more of a soaker than a sitter. The fries were topped with the buttery sauce bearing teeny tiny minces of mushroom. That sauce essentially soaks into the french fries. As it turns out, fries sodden with butter are tremendously difficult to eat-even for a person who has been known to dip chocolate chip cookies in butter. Disco Fries are lead in the belly. The egg on top, with it’s vinegary tabasco, that was good, though.

    You got your burger, your fries, all you need is a milkshake, and they do have milkshakes. Be forewarned, the server advised that each milkshake takes about five minutes to make. If there’s a milkshake rush where three orders arrive before yours, patience and math skills will be required (blenders are on sale at Target right now… just a thought).

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    Patience will be rewarded with a super thick shake complete with whipped cream, a fat straw and a spoon. The Buckeye ($6) is so thick, you’ll need to start with the spoon -plus, some of its little chunks of peanuts will never make it up that straw. For a little up-charge, you can burn away the richness with some chocolate vodka in the mix.

    You can find Stack City Burger Bar at 600 N. High Street.

    For more information, visit www.stackcityburger.com.

    Photos by Walker Evans. Photos are taken at a different time than review, so discrepancies between photos and review may occur.

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    Miriam Bowers Abbott
    Miriam Bowers Abbotthttps://columbusunderground.com
    Miriam Bowers Abbott is a freelancer contributor to Columbus Underground who reviews restaurants, writes food-centric featurettes and occasionally pens other community journalism pieces.
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