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2.20 - The Counter

Posted on June 18, 2008
Filed Under American, Extra Hard Core |

Hey, do you wanna build your own burger? Do you wanna choose your meat, cheese, toppings, sauce, even the kind of bread your burger sits on? YES PLEASE!

The Counter is a great burger joint in Santa Monica and was introduced to me (a long time ago) by my former boss. “You HAVE to try the apple pie milkshake,” he said, and I did. We’ll do a review of it here today, of course. I get hungry just looking at the burger order sheet.

You start on top with the most basic element: The meat. Choose from beef, turkey, veggie, or grilled chicken. Then, choose the weight of your meat. The price of your burger is determined accordingly. You can take it easy with a half pounder, eat a 2/3 pounder if you had a good workout that day, or go all out with a full pound of meat.

Then, you can choose your cheese. There’s 10 kinds of cheese to choose from, and all of them sound great. It’s easy to get lost with all of these great choices. Among them, horseradish cheddar, imported swiss, sharp provolone, even gruyere.

Then, you choose your toppings. There are 18 to choose from, and my favorites are carrot strings, grilled onions, hard boiled egg, bermuda red onion, and roasted red peppers. There are also premium toppings, which are a buck a pop, and they’re always very tempting. Fried egg, fried onion strings, honey cured bacon, avocados…

Then there’s 18 kinds of sauce you’ll have to choose from. Again, some pretty tempting choices and it’s easy to get lost. Try to remember your earlier choices and attempt to match your sauce to your toppings. Among the choices, horseradish mayo, roasted garlic aioli, apricot sauce, peanut sauce…

As a boon to my (occasionally enforced) low carb diet, they also offer burgers without buns and you can have your burger sit on top of a bed of lettuce blend or mixed baby greens. This is somehow a buck more. Go figure. The number of different burgers you can build here is well above 300,000.


We started the evening with an Apple Pie milkshake. I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s amazingly good. The smooth and creamy texture of the milkshake is occasionally punctuated by and greatly enhanced with little chunks of apple or pie crust. Delicious.

Sweet Potato fries. I love sweet potato fries, and these are a bit better than the ones at Hot’s Cantina. They also give you two kinds of sauce — ranch and honey mustard (?) In case you didn’t know, sweet potatoes have a low-glycemic index and is ranked #1 in nutritional value among vegetables, along with a ton of dietary fiber. If only everything that’s good for you tasted this good…

So for tonight we picked out two burgers. This is my Bun-free beef pounder with horseradish cheddar, carrot strings, grilled onions, hard boiled egg, roasted red peppers, along with the roasted garlic aioli sauce sitting on top of a bed of mixed baby greens. Yes, my life is sweet.


Here’s my date’s 1/3 pounder with sharp provolone, grilled onions, mixed baby greens, sprouts, tomatoes, with honey mustard on a hamburger bun.


The place gets PACKED! The bar section is first come first served, so if you see an empty seat, grab it. Otherwise you’d have to sign in on the waiting list at the door. Service was friendly but sometimes the waitress was a bit hard to find because it was so busy. The decor is very modern with skateboards hung on the walls, flat screen TVs, and a very cool garage door window system that gets lowered or raised to let the light in or block the setting sun. I’m definitely coming back for more of their shakes, sweet potato fries, and pounder burgers.

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