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FeedBurgers & Beer
Noisy new Easton joint serves great drink samplers and a good selection of fancy burgers
PHOTOS BY JODI MILLER
Flip Side is the latest moderately fancy burger joint to come to town. The restaurant and bar, imported from the Akron area, has landed at Easton Town Center, opposite Lifetime Fitness. The former Restaurant Hama space is now decked out like a shopping mall saloon, in brown hues and rough-hewn wood.
There’s a bar to the right, and counter-height tables and booths throughout. The ceiling is high, the music is loud, and diners add enough sound that the place seems noisy even when half-full. The atmosphere reminded me of campus-area eateries, except not as shabby.
The very best thing I found at Flip Side was their sampler of premium draft beers. For a not-unreasonable tab, you get to try four, from many good choices. The five-ounce pours come in nice, properly shaped glasses on a board with cut-outs to keep them from sliding around and a tab listing them in order so you can tell what you’re drinking.
Be warned: 20 ounces of premium (potent) beer is enough that you should make arrangements for a designated driver, unless your head is stronger than mine. Every one I sampled was excellent, from the vigorous and dry Green Flash West Coast IPA to the subtle Belgian-style North Coast Brother Thelonious Ale.
They also make a competent martini—cool and big but vaguely too herbal—and an array of other fancy cocktails, including one with house-infused applewood-smoked bacon vodka. I passed it up in favor of the beer.
The food was not always as good, alas. I really liked the sweet potato fries and the horseradish mustard sauce that came with them. Crisp and hot and dense. The thick fried onion rings were dry, not greasy, and tasted fine. Tempura asparagus with shiitake mushrooms was competent, if a little overcooked.
The chili cheese fries were quite tasty, but turned soggy fast; it’s the nature of the beast, so don’t blame Flip Side. But housemade potato chips, served splashed with yogurt blue cheese dressing and hot sauce on the side, arrived quite cool, almost cold. They weren’t greasy, but the cool temperature was disconcerting.
I sampled a variety of burgers, of course. There’s an admirably simple burger, served plain on a sesame-seed brioche bun with lettuce and tomato, called Simplicity Burger. It’s good enough, and leaves the burger and bun with nowhere to hide. The bun is good, but not great; evidently as brioche buns enter the mainstream, some of their extravagantly rich French heritage is being left behind. The burger itself was also good, but not great.
The beef, commendably, is from Ohio, and in life ate grass. If you don’t stop them, Flip Side will cook the burgers to somewhere between medium and well-done. Understandable, I guess, from a health-safety point of view, and some folks like them that way. The good news is that if you ask for medium-rare, they’ll cook the burger medium-rare. The bad news is that the thin seven-ounce patty is not particularly juicy even at medium-rare. Maybe we just like grain-fed beef?
The “Say Cheese” was also competent. You get your choice of six cheeses, and the American, which always seems right on a cheeseburger, was nicely melted. I forgot to ask for medium-rare, and the almost-well-done burger just didn’t have that cheeseburger charm. My bad. I still enjoyed it.
Next time, I tried the Chili Pepper Burger, which the menu boasts was seen on the Cooking Channel’s “Unique Eats.” The burger is topped with pepper jack cheese and thin slivers of allegedly pickled jalapeno, plus a couple of crisp onion rings with a little splatter of hot sauce; lettuce, tomato and pickle come on the side. There’s also a pot of thick, smoked-chili ketchup so you can add heat and flavor to your heart’s content.
This time I remembered to specify how I wanted the beef cooked, and it was the most satisfactory burger experience I had at Flip Side. Although still not particularly juicy, the cheese, ketchup and other trimmings added moistness and flavor, including a very nice hotness. Really a decent burger.
Then I got adventurous. The menu lists something called Louisiana “Laughing Bird” Shrimp Burger, said to provide seven ounces of fresh ground shrimp topped with fried green tomato, tomato jam, greens and Tabasco aioli.
Seems like a nice idea for a burger joint, right? Wrong. The burger smelled fishy even before the plate had been set down in front of me. The fried green tomato turned out to be icy cold. And the shrimp was so highly processed it had acquired a plasticky texture that reminded me of a dishwashing sponge. The Tabasco aioli on the side was pretty good, but the burger was a disaster.
John Champlin is a restaurant reviewer for Columbus Monthly.
