Hamburger Mary's

My first turn through the dining room was midday on a Sunday — a busy time, and just an hour ahead of a big party on the patio. I went right for the core of the menu: the Queen Mary burger, a half-pound of beef, cheddar and Jack cheese, smoked bacon, grilled white onions and the same quote/unquote special sauce as at every other burger restaurant in the universe — thinned, sugar-sweet, pinkish goop, a cross between Thousand Island salad dressing and Arby's sauce. Before my burger arrived, I had time to drink a couple of beers, test the nachos (about as good as what you'd find in an uppity bowling alley) and try an order of the kitchen's drunken shrimp — big 10-20s, jacketed in a Corona beer batter, fried and served with a Cajun dipping sauce. The shrimp were awful in every way possible. The batter was flavorless, undercooked and mealy, the shrimp inside mostly raw, and the dipping sauce tasted like Vaseline jacked with blackening spice and Old Bay seasoning. I took one bite of three different shrimp, spit them all out, hid the evidence in a napkin and dumped it in the men's room.

The burger arrived just as I was getting back to the table — a monster on a soft sesame-seed bun with a steak knife stabbed through the center and sticking rigidly out the top like a flagpole. Or something else. It was a great burger — done a perfect mid-rare, cheesy and bacony. I ate half to take the edge off my hunger, then finished the rest out of pure gluttonous joy. The fries on the side were forgettable — limp, dank and over-seasoned with salt and garlic powder and paprika, the same kind of season-all you can buy in any grocery store.

My second visit was for a weeknight dinner. Once again, the drunken shrimp were terrible. Once again, the fries were flaccid and gray-brown and over-seasoned. But once again, the burger was superb. This time I'd ordered a Mile High Flamer, a big burger served open-faced and topped with cheese, Colorado-style green chile that was more savory than hot, sour cream, shredded lettuce and tomatoes. The plate was a mess, so I ate the burger with a fork (how dignified...) and found that the up-from-frozen fries — even the bad ones — were delicious after a bath in the green chile.

Returning early on a Friday night and feeling frisky, I ordered the smoked pulled pork sandwich. Eating this pedestrian sandwich was the equivalent of having a pie from Pizza Hut on the day after you return from a month in Naples. Served wet with sticky and overly-sweet sauce on a brioche bun with a side of coleslaw, it wasn't terrible, but it could never come close to the real thing at a barbecue restaurant — to a mound of pulled shoulder, fresh from the smoker, and a splash of scratch-made sauce. But Mary's doesn't have a smoker out back. Instead, it has a patio designed for partiers who, wisely, don't come here looking for barbecue.

In addition to the burgers, the disappointing barbecue and the worse shrimp, Mary's offers salads, a short list of pizzas, a long list of cocktails and a kids' menu — but even the staff will say that you should probably leave the kids at home after six or seven o'clock. The menu features some local specialties, too: enchiladas and burritos because this is not Orlando or Cedar Rapids, but because Mary's is part of a chain, there's also the ubiquitous sesame-crusted ahi tuna. And, in fact, once you get past the gay-friendly marketing and gay-fabulous decor, past the trappings of special events and dedicated regulars on the patio, once you look really closely at the menu, you'll recognize that Mary's is really just another theme restaurant — a kind of Castro District Outback or Fire Island Bennigan's. Though, granted, one that makes really, really good burgers.

So if there are gay folk in town who feel uncomfortable hanging with the bikers at Bud's or the line cooks at the Cherry Cricket, I'm glad they have a burger place of their own, where they can feel welcome and unthreatened. But they're going to have to make room for me, too, because the burgers here are so good that I wouldn't care if the theme was Conservative Republicanism or Hitler's March on Poland. I'd just throw on a brown shirt, grow a little mustache and show up anyway.

I wouldn't order the drunken shrimp, though. Or the pulled pork. It's enough that there's something about the burgers at Mary's...