rev:text
| - I met up with some friends in Charlotte last night and they took me to Kickstand. If they hadn't told me this was a burger joint, I would have mistook it for a sports bar. In fact, if I lived in Charlotte, I'd probably come here to watch sports.
The restaurant shares the same building (and restrooms) with an Americanized Mexican restaurant next door. To enter either restaurant, you must enter a common area in between. This area has a few TVs and arcade video game machines. Kickstand itself has a ton of TVs. Some of the booths have their own TVs. There's a long bar and a separate room where I saw some Wii action going on. There are also some outdoor patios.
Kickstand offers a wide variety of burgers, about 20 different kinds, that range anywhere in price from $7 to $14 per plate. Each plate comes with a side. Some of the more interesting sides that caught my attention include the sweet potato tater tots ("sweet tater tots") and the gourmet corn on the cob.
I ordered the sweet tater tots because I've never had tater tots made out of sweet potatoes before. The tater tots looked and tasted just how you'd imagine them. If you've had sweet potato fries before, it's the same idea. You get the same sweetness and consistency of the sweet potatoes in your tater tots. The sweet tater tots are served with a brown sugar butter syrup which is very rich and thick.
One of my friends got the gourmet corn on the cob and it looked like it was fried or slightly charred with seasonings and sprinkled with a bit of Parmesan cheese. Yum.
As for my burger, I went all out and got the "Hung Over Cyclist." This burger has two grilled cheese sandwiches as the bun. By default, the burger comes with just a tomato on top, but I asked for lettuce and onion too. All this for just $7.50.
When it was served to me, it looked like a plate with two grilled cheese sandwiches, except the two grilled cheese sandwiches had stuff on top of them. One had lettuce, tomato, and onion on top, while the other had a burger patty. I added some ketchup to the patty, put the two suckers together, and chomped down. Not bad! The Hung Over Cyclist tasted exactly how it looked. There was lots of extra bread and cheese because I was basically biting into two sandwiches at once. It still tasted like a burger, though, because of the hamburger meat. I finished everything, including my tots.
Towards the end of my meal, I realized the server did not ask me how I wanted my burger cooked. I'm used to getting asked this in Atlanta, but my Charlotte friend informed me that North Carolina has gotten more strict about cooking meat, and most places will cook burgers well-done.
If I ever come back here, I think I'd order one of their traditional burgers. While the Hung Over Cyclist was good, I ordered it more for the novelty of it. One of my friends ordered the Kickstand Burger and it looked really good.
Our server was Adam and he was great. Kickstand has ample parking in the back in a gravel lot.
|