This past week I had the pleasure of spending a few days on Dauphin Island, Alabama with Lauren. We basically ate nothing, drank beer, and lounged in the sunlight for three glorious days. Toward the end of our trip, when we were hungry, hungover, and sunburnt, we started hallucinating visions of cheeseburgers, and attempted to figure out how to use a grill in order to cook for ourselves. Unfortunately, neither of us have any knowledge of how to use a gas grill, and somehow managed to spray propane on the porch, which I’m pretty sure is a fire hazard.
Appendix A: What I was convinced was going to happen if I continued my attempt to turn on the grill.
Knowing we would be driving home the following day, we decided we would stop in Mobile to have the burger we’d been craving for a week. Our final night at the beach was spent thinking we were going to die from what I was convinced was a hurricane (but what turned out to be only a thunderstorm), and fighting to find enough cell phone reception to research what restaurants in Mobile (if any) had good cheeseburgers. I was able to stumble onto a blog entry highlighting the 19 Burgers To Eat Before You Die centered around Southern Alabama. Although I appreciate the variety of choices in the blog, I wish he would have just named his favorite and saved me a bunch of work. Since I’m lazy and got frustrated trying to contort my body in ways that would allow me to get cell phone service, I just decided to go with the first burger joint on the list, Heroes Sports Bar & Grill.
I STILL ONLY HAVE ONE BAR. DAMN YOU, VERIZON!
Now I don’t know if it’s because it was overcast, so no one was really walking around downtown, but Mobile seemed kind of creepy when we were driving around. On the walk to the restaurant Lauren and I were picking out what items we could use as weapons, just in case we had unwittingly stumbled into the zombie apocalypse. When we entered Heroes, we were a little unnerved by the fact that it was packed with people. And by “people,” I mean “men…” nary a lady in sight (other than our waitress, that is).
Apparently they’d already eaten all the womenfolk.
After we sat down and perused the menu, Lauren got really excited by the fact that they had fried pickles on the menu. They also had a lot of really good looking appetizers, like spinach and crawfish dip, mexican egg rolls, and waffle cut sweet potato fries. If I’d been with more people, I would have ordered another appetizer to try it, but I know Lauren would never eat any of the appetizers I wanted. We were a little disappointed when the fried pickles turned out to be fried pickle spears instead of pickle chips. They’re just so much harder to eat that way. They stay molten lava hot for about 45 minutes, and the breading falls off when you try to eat it, so you just end up getting third degree burns on your tongue from a pickle.
Try explaining that injury to your mother.
For my meal, I got the Hero Burger with American cheese and bacon. The burgers are served with 2 sides, so I got French Fries (don’t tell Jesus!) and baked beans. The burger was really great. It was thick, and tasted like it just came off of a grill. The only thing I had a problem with was that there was just way too much bread, which kind of took away from the flavor of the beef and overpowered the burger as a whole. But I did like that they supplied a generous helping of toppings (two slices of tomato, onions, lettuce, etc). The bacon was the perfect level of crunchiness. It was a really good burger, but by no means the best I’ve ever had. The fries were crinkle cut (my favorite) and delicious. The beans tasted homemade and were a perfect complement to the burger. Basically, I overindulged and enjoyed every minute of it.
“X” marks the spot where I’m going to start shoveling food into my face.
Lauren got basically the same thing as me, only she (of course) got a salad as her side instead of anything fun or flavorful. The salad looked basically like one of those ready-pack salad mixes with iceberg lettuce and shredded cabbage. They threw on a couple of pieces of vegetables and some croutons to make it seem like something other than rabbit food, but there was really no disguising it (props for trying, though). But, that’s what you get for ordering a salad from a sports bar.
Honestly, I don’t even know why I bother.
Bottom line: Get a burger. Add bacon. Skip the salad and the pickles.
Apparently Mobile is creepily deserted no matter what the weather is like outside.
Heroes Sports Bar and Grill
273 Dauphin Street
Mobile, AL 36602
(251) 433-4376
