Augie’s Front Burner

Augie’s Front Burner (Website)

109 S. 5th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701

217-544-6979 (Map It)

Hours:

     Lunch: Mon-Fri 11a-2:30p

     Dinner: Mon-Sat 5p-9:30p

Augie-10


Electrical Outlets:

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WiFi:

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A little food …  (* “Thrifty Menu” is 4/10 c)

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 like 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, next to a running particle accelerator if the tables are big, the napkins are paper, and the food is great!  Unfortunately, Augie’s Front Burner suffers in exactly those three 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 Reuben 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 – in short, 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.

AugieCheese-10
Augie Salad-10
Augie Rueben-10
Augie Cobbler-10

I left out the Reuben because that deserves its own paragraph.  I love Reubens … a lot.  What’s not to love?  Rye, corned beef, sauerkraut, and a Thousand Island-like dressing.  Loving them means trying all incarnations of them to see how they compare to the original.  Grouper is a fish that has more flavor than Cod, but not too fishy.  In a Reuben though, it just doesn’t work – there’s not enough distinct flavor 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 process.  As I re-read this article, I’m wondering if my harshness derives mostly from my dissatisfaction with the Reuben.  Since this is not a Peer Reviewed text – too bad!

 

A little science …

The aging of corned beef is measured in days.  Brie is aged in 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 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!