Augie’s Front Burner

Address
109 S. 5^th Street
Springfield, Illinois 62701
217-544-6979
Map It  |  Website

Hours
Lunch: Mon-Fri 11a-2:30p
Dinner: Mon-Sat 5p-9:30p

Miscellaneous
WiFi: unknown
Electrical Outlets: unknown

Located across the street from Illinois’ Old State Capitol, Augie’s Front Burner occupies a building largely unchanged since the late 1800s.  The interior sports a style of an intimate saloon that looks pleasant enough.  But any Hungry Physicist will tell you that decor just doesn’t matter as much.  We’ll eat underground in a square stone room, or next to a running particle accelerator.  All that really matters is that the tables are big, the napkins are paper, and the food is great!  Unfortunately, Augie’s Front Burner suffers in exactly those areas.

Maybe it’s because I ordered from the “Thrifty Thursday” menu, but the food here needs work.  (Their regular menu is ridiculously-priced) Maybe to them, “Thrifty Thursday” is a clean-out-the-fridge-and-make-whatever-you-can day.  Even then, the concoction still should taste good.  I ordered a cheese board, a cucumber and tomato salad, a Grouper Rueben and potato salad, and a peach cobbler.  Let’s go through these, because if I had to endure some of them so will you!  The cheeseboard featured a nice aged Brie with a fantastic pepper jam, and some crunchy multigrain crackers.  The cucumber and tomato salad was… well… cucumbers and tomatoes thinly cut and placed into a mound with a light oil dressing – it was dull.  The creamy potato salad worked very well with bold flavors making up for the lack of mustard.  Finally, as peach cobblers go, it wasn’t terrible.  It was more of a can of peaches in syrup, warmed up and put in a bowl with a pie crust circle and ice cream.

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I left out the Rueben because that deserves its own paragraph.  I love Ruebens… a lot.  What’s not to love?  Rye, corned beef, sauerkraut, and a Thousand Island-like dressing.  Loving them means trying all their incarnations to see how they compare to the original.  Grouper is a fish that has more flavor than Cod, but not too fishy.  In a Rueben though, it just doesn’t work – the flavor isn’t distinct enough to compete with the sauerkraut and dressing.  That said, both the sauerkraut and dressing were too sparse.  The result was a sandwich that had three different subtle flavors depending on the evenness of the assembly.  As I re-read this article, I’m wondering if my harshness toward Augie’s Front Burner derives mostly from my dissatisfaction with the Rueben.  That may be true, but if I’m doing it someone else will too.

The aging of corned beef is measured in days.  Brie is aged over weeks and months.  How do we measure the age of things thousands of years old?  Carbon-14.  What it is, and why it is, are subjects of other articles.  Suffice it to say that our atmosphere contains Carbon-14 in a certain proportion.  As we participate in the life cycle, our bodies adopt the same proportion of Carbon-14.  The neat thing is that Carbon-14 is constantly replenished in the atmosphere, and maintains the same proportion.  Also, it’s radioactive and decays over time into other elements.  When we die, the Carbon-14 in our bodies has no way to replenish, so the proportion in our bodily material goes down with time.  This means that the proportion of Carbon-14 in any organic material tells us very accurately when that material died, up to about 50,000 years ago!