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FIVE GUYS FAMOUS BURGERS AND FRIES
Marumsco Plaza, Woodbridge
Phone: 703/492-8882
Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week.
Tab for two: About $11. If you drive up from Fredericksburg, it might cost you more for gas than for food.
Atmosphere: What atmosphere?
Credit cards: This is a cash-only burger joint.
Other info: Be prepared to wait in line. It's worth it.
Directions: Interstate 95 north to Exit 161 toward Woodbridge. Follow U.S. 1 south. Go two miles to Marumsco Plaza at the intersection of U.S. 1 and Longview Drive. From Potomac Mills, follow Smoketown Road to U.S. 1 and turn left, heading north. Follow U.S. 1 about two miles to Marumsco Plaza.
THE FREE LANCE-STAR
OK, so Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries in Woodbridge is actually my little brother's favorite restaurant. But I've been a devotee of their fat juicy burgers and big greasy fries since he dragged me to the bare-bones dive on U.S. 1 last summer.
The restaurant's downright rude interior can be a turn-off, until you try the burgers and fries. A hand-chalked menu propped on the open kitchen's back wall is just as simple as the rest of the surroundings. Hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese, fries and soda. That's it. If you want a milkshake, go to McDonald's.
For those waiting in line, and there's always a slow line, a sack of salty, roasted peanuts sits atop an upside-down trash can. The shells go--where else?--on the floor. Crunching them underfoot is part of the whole Five Guys experience, along with the Jimi Hendrix music blasting from unseen speakers.
Sanitized floors and Happy Meals are not what this place is about. At the expense of everything else, Five Guys hangs its business on absolute freshness. Nothing, not a single hot dog or pure beef patty, is ever frozen. There's no freezer in the joint. The fries (99 cents to $3.19) started that morning as dirty Idaho spuds. They are always fried in pure peanut oil.
My brother babbled on and on with praise for the fresh-not-frozen fries, then warned me not to get the large. I looked longingly as other customers walked away with their big, oil-splotched brown bags--the cooks fill every paper sack to overflowing with those fries. You can order them plain or with a shake of Cajun spice.
Be true to the place and skip the spice. The plain spuds will fondly remind locals of those famous fries at Thrasher's on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Md.
Five Guys even has salt shakers and bottles of malt vinegar on each of the five or six cheap, wobbly tables in what it calls a dining room.
I always order a plain burger, every now and then adding one of the many extras offered at no additional cost: lettuce, tomatoes, onions, fried onions, sautéed mushrooms, mayo, mustard, ketchup, green peppers, jalapeño peppers, relish, A-1 steak sauce, hot sauce or barbecue sauce.
Price is determined by size, and whether you want bacon and cheese. A regular hamburger is $3.29 and the others are all under $4, except the big bacon cheeseburger at $4.39. It's worth the extra cost. The bacon is fried crisp in a pan, never microwaved.
Everything at Five Guys comes cheap--hot dogs cost $2.89, grilled cheese sandwiches $1.69 and drinks cost $1.19.
No one at Five Guys asks how you how want your burger done; they always comes medium-well, soaking the sesame seed-studded buns with their juice. The burgers themselves, made of loose-packed 80-percent lean ground beef, tend to crumble out the sides, along with all those many extras. The tasty sloppiness makes it easy to forget the dingy surroundings.
One of the few things hanging on the wall at the Woodbridge location is a bulletin board covered with little bright-orange-and-pink notecards with customers' comments about Five Guys:
"Beats McDonald's."
"I loved this place in Arlington in my younger days and now I bring my sons here."
"Five Guys rocks!"
To really appreciate the place, you have to understand where Five Guys is coming from. In the early 1980s, Arlington life-insurance salesman Jerry Murrell offered his teen-age sons a choice--go to college or start a hamburger joint. The boys chose the hamburger business. Murrell invested $70,000, put his three oldest sons in charge and had the chutzpah to put his new venture right smack between a McDonald's and a Wendy's on Columbia Pike. It worked.
Why buy skinny little fries and an emaciated frozen beef patty on a bun when you can have a big, fat, real burger for the same price? It didn't take long to establish a following.
Today, Five Guys is a small chain, with four locations in Arlington, Alexandria, Springfield and Woodbridge. Its burgers have been voted the metropolitan area's best two years in a row by Washingtonian magazine. However, don't expect anything from the place but a really good burger and fries.
It seems most Five Guys customers are die-hard regulars. They know exactly what they want before they even pull into the parking lot. There's an unspoken way of doing things here, and the busy kitchen staff doesn't have much patience for befuddled newcomers. And longtime customers waiting behind you might sigh with impatience if you take too long to order.
But you'll have a hard time spending more than $15 for two, complete with lots of fries and soda. And you'll be full for what seems like days.