There is some doubt

No Doubt Stout BBQ Burger, a photo by jaceman4 on Flickr.

So as a final pit stop in my recent visit to Seattle, I decided to meet up with a bunch of friends at a fairly centralized locale (for us) to grab dinner and generally just hang out. That place was Elliott Bay in the Lake City area, which was newer (relatively), meaning that it wasn't there when I left (about two years ago). It was a fairly typical brewery type restaurant, which meant generally pub type food. I decided that since they were a brewery to get the No Doubt Stout BBQ Burger, which is made from their No Doubt Stout ale.

Everything was fairly well prepared, the burger came with cheese, onions straws, lettuce, tomato, onion, and BBQ sauce. Unfortunately, this particular burger proved (at least for me) that burgers aren't really BBQ items. While you might cook a rack of ribs or brisket on a grill like a burger, the flavors you are going for are different. That being said, while I like meaty burgers, I also understand that you don't want your burger to be too dense, otherwise it becomes kind of bogged down and dry like a meatloaf sandwich. That's part of the reason you don't necessarily want to use the leanest cut of meat for your burgers. Now, it wasn't that the meat here was dry, but rather that the BBQ sauce was designed for something slightly tougher, such as a brisket or a tri-tip, not a burger. It wasn't that the sauce was bad, it just didn't fit the burger schema. In short, the BBQ sauce was too sweet, the flavor really overwhelmed everything else on the burger. Maybe some people like it that way, but for me, it made things really hard to taste on the burger, and thus, sort of ruined the burger experience.

The fries were good, not much else needs to be said here. It's pretty hard to ruin fries. Nothing special, but sometimes simplicity is best. I'm not going to say Elliott Bay is a bad place to eat, from what I saw of everyone else's food, it all looked good. Conceptually, this burger made sense, it was safe, but unfortunately, execution marred the concept.