Larkburger: 4 stars.

I once watched an episode of How I Met Your Mother (s4e2) where Marshall, years earlier, ate the best burger in New York, and now they all run around trying to find it again. In this process, they eat at a lot of different hamburger places until they finally find the one that Marshall ate at before, and it is indeed the best burger they've ever had in their lives.

While I like this episode quite a lot, I thought it was going to be about all of them deciding they wanted to find the best burger in New York, and going out and trying a ton of different ones (versus what it was actually about, where they had already found it, they just couldn't remember where it was). That made me want to find the best burger in the Denver-ish area. And I told my friend Sara about this wonderful dream I had.

Unfortunately, Sara (at the time I told her about this dream) was a vegetarian. So she couldn't really join me. And who wants to go alone? Though she did volunteer to come with me and test out all the french fries and find the best kind in the Denver-ish area. But that just wouldn't be the same, so we never actually did it. Fortunately, about 10 months ago, Sara decided, because there was actually animal product in so much of what she was eating without realizing it (jello, pudding, etc), she'd rather just put meat back into her diet (which also means I have a hilarious and terrible story to tell her. I think everyone knows it, but once I finally do actually tell her, I will put it up, just in case).

So, many months later, we actually have decided to go out and find the Best Burger in the Denver-ish Area! We made a list of 14 criteria, and we're rating said burgers on a scale of 1-10 for each criterion. 1 being terrible, 10 being perfect. Most of them are on a positive scale (fresh, juicy, delicious, flavors, uniqueness, condiment-ratio, appearance, price--cheaper price=higher score, and fullness-level, side dish deliciousness, side dish uniqueness), and a few of them are on a negative scale (bun soakage, greasiness, messy). For example, if the burger leaves you feeling full and satisfied, we'd give it a 10-- for being perfectly satisfying. Similarly, if the burger was really greasy and I hesitated to touch anything without first using 5 napkins, it would also get a score of 10-- for being perfectly greasy.

For the negative criteria, when we average out the ratings at the end of the meal, we negate/invert the score it was given. So, averaging the two ratings I listed above, we'd take a 10 for fullness-level as it is, and then we'd flip the 10 for greasy and make it a 0. Then average 10 and 0 together, and come up with 5. It's a little complicated, and I don't really know why I decided that would be the way it is, but it made more sense at the time in my head to rate it like that, and I still know how to do the math for it, so hey. Why not.

[Basically, for the positive criteria, 1=1, 2=2, 3=3... 10=10. For the negative criteria, 1=9, 2=8, 3=7... 10=0.]

Sara and I have a great list of restaurants to try, starting with just fast food joints, and toward the end we'll probably take it up to sit down restaurants as well. We'll be reviewing one restaurant about every two weeks, and we actually reviewed this one last week (so get ready for rating number two next week). One of these places just barely opened off of 120th and Washington, on the southwest corner.

Alright. Now that all that's out of the way, onto the review!

Larkburger

Really cool restaurant. Super awesome customer service. Gotta love the toasted bun. And, they have an awesome drink machine-- I'm livin' in the future! Very eco-friendly. Awesome staff. Clean and fresh environment.

I guess Sara and I actually have really similar tastes in food. Larkburger doesn't actually have a lot of options burger-wise, but they do have a ton of options in total. It's not strictly a "burger joint." They have tons of chicken sandwiches, I think there were a couple turkey sandwiches, and they also have vegetarian food. Maybe they had some vegan food? I don't really remember because we're looking to find the best hamburger in the Denver-ish Area, and so we clearly went for a hamburger option. We just got their regular larkburger (with pepperjack cheese), and garlic truffle fries.

Freshness: 9, 9

Juiciness: 10, 9

Deliciousness: 10, 10

[Bun-soakage: 3, 4]

Flavor-awesomeness: 10, 9

Uniqueness: 2, 2

[Messiness: 4, 6]

Condiment-ratio: 6, 5

[Greasiness: 5, 5]

Appearance: 8, 8

Price: 8, 8

Fullness-level: 9, 10

Side dish deliciousness: 10, 8

Side dish uniqueness: 9, 9

Sara's first bite. She looks confused, but happy.

My first bite. I look betrayed, and not happy. But trust me, that's a look of disbelief that a burger could taste so good.

The food got out to us really fast, and they didn't have a lot of different options as far as what kind of burger you could get, and all the options they did have (that we saw, at least) were regular burgers that you can get pretty much anywhere. So that's why uniqueness got such a low rating. The bun was not soaked until you got to the last couple bites, so overall that was good. Generally, I loved it. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to get a delicious burger. They don't do combos, and the burger itself was about 5 bucks, then the fries were an additional 2 or 3 dollars. The drink was like 1.50 or something. Not terrible pricing, and definitely worth it.

Let me just take a minute, though, to talk about the future-drink dispenser. It was amazing! It was a touch screen, so you go up to it and think, "Hm. I'll have some Coke!" so you touch the Coke-button on the screen, and it doesn't just give you Coke-- no no. It pops up with a ton of different options! Do you want Vanilla Coke? Lime Coke (pretty nasty)? Orange Coke (also pretty nasty)? Raspberry Coke? Cherry Coke? Vanilla Cherry Coke? Or just plain old Coke? And Fanta! They had tons of flavors for that as well-- I've never even heard of Peach Fanta! But it was an option. So awesome. We actually started off with just a couple water cups, but I made Sara go back up with some money and buy us soda cups because we were both so excited about this amazing machine!

[Funny story, when we bought our food in the first place, Jennifer (the cashier) says, "Do you want any drinks?" "Uh, no. That's ok." "Ok. Do you just want some water cups?" "Yes. That would be lovely, thanks." And then, after seeing the machine, and after we finish our meal, we decide we're going to have to get some soda so we can try it! Larkburger was on me, so I give some money to Sara to go buy the soda cups, and she looks at me incredulously. "You're not just going to use your water cup?" So I quote a little The Way of Kings at her and say, "No. Sara, 'someone has to do what is right because it is right, or no one will follow.'" She takes my money and goes up to get a couple sodas, and Jennifer was also very confused. "You... you don't just want water cups?" "No, we changed our minds..." Haha. Gotta love it.]

[One more funny story: I don't know if the people who worked there thought we were secret shoppers or anything, but we're sitting there, taking pictures of the food, and we've got our notebooks. It looks like we know what we're doing (HA.) and at the end of our meal, one of the girls asks us if we'd mind taking a survey really quick about our experience. Fantastic. It made us laugh.]

So yes. Larkburger was delicious, it gets an average rating of 7.8 from me and 7.3 from Sara, which makes for: