All I can say is, as a burger joint, their deep fried oreos were delicious.
And now proceeding with the due diligence:
To be honest, I do not like downtown Gainesville. Parking there is a pain. You commonly have to fight through the club goers to get to the good places. The random one way streets can be annoying. All the same, reviewing a restaurant requires a harmonious frame of mind. If I'm not judging restaurants on the length of time it takes to get the food, judging them on inconvenience to get to would probably be unfair. All the same, full disclosure: I don't like downtown Gainesville. Does that affect my reviews? I hope not, but that's the reality.
So I, along with 5 other people decided to visit Sweet Mel's after a play reading. The main promise of a substantial variety of burgers perked my interest. Like pizza, burgers can be a fairly blank slate by which you can make some incredible things. All it takes is using some quality ingredients and you can make a simple and delicious burger. Vary up the toppings, and you can really make something spectacular. The truly great burger places grind their own meat, which you can usually taste. As a result, I'm always up for giving a burger a shot.
The first page of the menu is basically all their varieties of burgers. There are twelve burgers, all of them around $9. My girlfriend and I were hungry so we decided to go with the onion rings as an appetizer for $6.
The onion rings were pretty good. Solid texture. Not too greasy. I'm pretty sure they used a beer batter to create a very crisp onion ring. The onion rings themselves were pretty large and had good body to them. All the same, at around $6, I really didn't feel like I got my money's worth. There just weren't many onion rings for the price. I'd say they were worth about $4. That's 150% more than what I felt they were worth. Part of the issue is that they were actually pretty good, and I did want more...just not at that price. Onion rings are cheap to make.
I ordered the Smokey Mountain BBQ. It came with BBQ sauce, bacon, onion rings, and cheddar cheese. When I was asked how I liked mine cooked, I said medium rare...so I expected medium rare. This is how it looked:
While the burger does look good, the problem is at the heart of the burger. The meat itself just isn't very good. I didn't get much of a crust on mine implying that the surface it was cooked on just wasn't hot enough to build the necessary Maillard reaction. But the main problem:
It's just grey. The burger was cooked medium well to well done. Vastly different than the medium rare I requested. Beyond that though, the meat itself tasted pretty bland. Is that due to it being overcooked? Potentially. It could have just not been very high quality beef though. It certainly wasn't grass fed, and it certainly didn't have a very fresh taste. Further, the trick most people use with burgers to put a layer of mayo or something to prevent all the grease from the burger from annihilating the bun was not to be found here. As a result, the burger basically disintegrated about halfway into the eating of the burger. Further, the bacon was overcooked, so even ol' reliable bacon couldn't be counted on to bring more than just a texture.
The specialty burger I also encountered was their breakfast style of burger. Instead of hamburger buns, they used french toast. It also included an egg, 3 slices of bacon, cheese, and hash browns.
The burger was, like my burger, cooked past medium. The bacon wasn't any more flavorful than mine. The hashbrowns tasted like more like they had once been frozen instead of the kind of hashbrowns you get at a legit breakfast place. The egg was also overcooked (seeing a theme.) I thought something that could have pulled it together was a more runny egg that could have been a sort of Eggs Benedict effect with a looser yolk. The French Toast was barely coated in the egg batter you want with good French Toast, and it certainly didn't use a good quality French bread (which you'd want with French Toast...go figure.) As you can see, there's more confectioner sugar than batter. In the end, it just didn't offer much.
Along with the burgers came the choice of a side. I got the Devil Fries, which were basically just fries with some cheese melted on top tossed with some buffalo style sauce. They kind of soaked the fries, which killed the crispiness. Instead of giving a spicy seasoning to crisp fries, melting the cheese, and then having an interesting spicy sauce for the fries, it felt just kind of half-assed. My girlfriend's sweet potato fries were OK. They weren't as crispy as they could have been, but that's the only issue I had with them.
My girlfriend and I decided to split desert. We went with the deep fried Oreos. We got four deep fried Oreos for $6. It was actually a pretty cool desert. The batter was light and tasty. That being said, I think $6 is still a bit much for 4 deep fried Oreo cookies.
In the end, Sweet Mel's seems to be more of a bar that is trying to have some food options more than being primarily a food place. Randomly during our meal, club music came on really loudly. There was nobody dancing. There were no lights or anything. It was just sort of bewildering. The food took about a hour to come out as well, while we were the only ones in the restaurant. I'll have to admit I was pretty confused by that considering burgers take all of eight minutes or so to cook and set up (if you've done any semblance of kitchen prep.) As I said, I don't tend to judge restaurants on this (probably the thing I have most in common with the Frnech besides a love of roux,) but I felt it was worth noting by its weirdness.
To conclude, I do not recommend this place. If you want a great burger, my favorite in Gainesville remains The New Deal Cafe.
-Charles
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