#bmvb

Whistlestop Ale House

Lilly and I moved to Renton from Seattle this past February.

A few weeks after moving in we wanted to eat out and settled on Whistlestop Ale House.  I heard a recommendation from a Chase bank teller while in Seattle.

Whistlestop is a bit tough to get to and park at, since "downtown" Renton is full of one-way streets. Additionally, Whistlestop has very limited parking. That said, we found street parking within a block, so really, how lazy can we be?

The place is a bit divey, which I usually like. The beer selection was quite good, but that's not included in my burger rankings.

The scoring of the San Diego Station burger is below. It wasn't anything to write home about. However, it was decent and not too expensive. I've enjoyed pretty much every burger I've ever eaten, this one included.

San Diego Station Burger:

Beef = 2.5 Bun = 3.0 Toppings = 5.0 Fries = 3.5

Price = $14.44

OMVB = 4.93

Service = 3.0 Ambience - 1.0

BMVB = 5.63

Loulay Kitchen & Bar

On Friday I went to Loulay to try their Beef Burger.

The lunch menu describe the Beef Burger simply as “Fries, aioli, bacon-shallot jam.” I’ve wondered about bacon jam (first popularized by Skillet Diner to my knowledge). What was the impetus behind the creation of bacon jam? Was it to be fancy and actually use less bacon than putting on 2–3 strips? Or was artistry and originality truly desired?

Now I showed up at Loulay a mere five minutes after they opened for lunch, but the service was fast and the burger took only about ten minutes to arrive.

I appreciate burgers that are constructed in a way to make it possible to eat them. The Loulay burger’s cheese, lettuce and jam was all arranged within the bun, and not spilling out upon arrival.

The beef was wonderful, moist, flavorful, but not over seasoned.

The bun was quite good: soft, yet able to hold together.

The toppings were good: bacon jam, cheese (not sure what kind) and butter lettuce (I think).

So on to the scoring portion.

I’ve scored about 10 burgers and noticed a place where my methodology falls short. The burgers under $4 always come out on top in both the BMVB and OMVB rankings, due to the large disparity in price. Basically, the possible disparity in price is larger on a relative scale than the possible disparity in quality, since I used a 1–10 scale for each quality category.

To remedy this, and hopefully I’m not making too many actual statisticians squirm with my ad hoc changes, I’m squaring each of the quality terms before dividing by price. This makes sense, since the quality improvement of a burger is not usually linear as price increases; the improvement is exponential. We can quabble on what exactly the exponent should be, but my model is closer to reality than when I assumed a linear relationship

Loulay Beef Burger:

Beef = 7.5 Bun = 6.5 Toppings = 7.0 Fries = 6.0

Price = $22.34

OMVB = 15.77

Service = 8.5 Ambience - 6.0