It is the duty, nay, obligation, of everyone writing about the Twin Cities food scene this summer to write about hamburgers. That's because three very high-profile burger joints have opened here over the course May-June, an event I am dubbing the Twin Cities Patty Orgy. Two up-and-coming national chains, Five Guys and Smashburger, opened Minneapolis outposts. And then there's Burger Jones, which for non-resident readers is a very popular new place just two blocks from my home, run by one of the biggest local restaurant groups.

So far, I've been to Five Guys and Burger Jones. The Smashburger I can conveniently drive to is less than a week old, so I haven't gotten to it yet, but I will. Burger Jones was an experience I'm still digesting. Not mentally or emotionally, I'm just convinced that, about three weeks later, some of that epic meal still resides in my colon. So first I'm gonna talk about Five Guys.

Five Guys opened in Edina, near Southdale mall, in the ugliest strip mall in the universe. Designed by what clearly was a blind architect who sucked at Tetris, the three story structure shows its gray, service-entranced ass to France Ave for no good reason. This blocks the view of a very small parking lot and an even uglier Container Store which fronts an EVEN UGLIER parking garage behind it. It's like they somehow made a batch of forty tons of concrete, and then found out that the concrete hated itself. So they built this strip mall with it. Even worse, when you actually get in and amongst the self-hating concrete, you find that it wraps around a lovely little park. Which is good, because you'll need somewhere other than inside Five Guys to sit and eat.

Five Guys attempts to pull off its lack of ambience via a sense of ironic detachment, by including boxes of peanuts, and encouraging people who are not actually in a dive bar in Oklahoma to eat the peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. Yay. Didn't matter, because every single table was full of Edinans in shorts.

Anyway, the burgers. I cannot accurately evaluate the Five Guys burger experience. I can tell you that the buns appear to have escaped from a Wendy's. They're very white and very squishy, much like the Edina clientele. I got mine with grilled mushrooms, which didn't taste like much, grilled onions, which didn't taste like much, and mustard, which was good. The burgers themselves? That is a tale of incompetence and cultural divide.

I went to the counter and ordered a regular, because the options were regular and small, and I didn't want a small. The countergirl then asked me if I wanted one patty or two. I didn't want a double regular, so I asked for one. The result was a bit anemic and underbeefed. Not bad, but nothing even remotely special. Weeks later, I discovered that at Five Guys, a "small" is one patty, and a "regular" is two. So I had eaten a small without knowing it. I think it would have been better with the second beef patty, but I haven't been back to find out yet.

The two best things about Five Guys are the fries and the service. The fries are great - they appear to be hand-cut, are definitely skin-on, are fried up crisp and served in borderline-obscene quantities. And barring the linguistic snafu, once the orders are in, a mighty assembly line puts the burgers together at high speed. And since both registers issued tickets using the same numbering system, there wasn't that thing you get at, say, a Baja Sol where there are three different counts going and the orders come up out of order anyway. If you get number 60, you're getting your burgers after #59 got his and before #61 gets theirs. I like that in a counter-service place.

Final verdict - if you're in the area and you want burgers, they're the best burgers in the area. But I don't think I'd head that way speciifically to get burgers there unless different toppings and the right number of goddamned beef patties makes a really big difference.