Review: Flipside Burger

Grass fed burger at Flipside Bar & Burger, Santa Rosa. (phot0 by Jeff Kan Lee/PD)

Haute cuisine, it isn’t. But the food at the new Flipside Bar & Burger on Third Street in Santa Rosa is excellent for what it is — down-home American comfort food. And with one swipe of the spatula, they serve the best burger in town. How do they do it?

For the Grass Fed Burger ($14.95), the cooks start with 100 percent grass-fed, naturally raised beef, grind it themselves, and serve up a thick, juicy six ounces of meat with a broiled surface to bring up the flavor, sitting on a good commercial bun. Owner Nino Rabbaa, who also owns Rendez Vous Bistro on Fourth Street, has plans for a bakery in the near future and you can expect future buns to be made from scratch, just like most everything at Flipside.

So if you order the plain Grass Fed, it’s just the burger and the bun, but you can add lettuce, tomato, pickles and red onion — all of them or any combination you like. For $2 more, you can add one of the following: Flipside’s remarkably good fries (not overly salted and perfectly cooked in fresh oil), green salad, applewood-smoked bacon, chili, guacamole, cheese or egg. For 75 cents more, choose from mushrooms, jalapeños, extra sauce or caramelized onions. You can only make a really good burger better with these choices.

Don’t let that price for the Grass Fed scare you away. Grass Fed beef is pricey, but it’s really good for you, with extra amounts of health-promoting conjugated linoleic acid. You’ll find 13 other burgers on the menu, starting at $7.95 for the Classic, served on a toasted bun with lettuce, tomatoes and pickles.

Maybe it’s because the place is new and people just want to try it out, or because lots of people in their 20s and 30s don’t like the long lines at the In-N-Out on County Center Drive, but the place is a maelstrom of youthful energy … meaning it’s loud in there. Thankfully, there’s a comfortable outside seating area facing the 3rd Street Cinema and the Third Street Aleworks where you can hear yourself think, and it has couches to recline on for mega-thinking.

The décor is American sportsy, with a shadow box containing mementos of a fight between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson and large, HD flat-screen TVs with sports events. The pass-through to the kitchen is framed in pressed-tin plates. Besides booths and tables, a long counter has 20 stools and old-fashioned clips under the counter that used to be used for holding men’s hats but nowadays will hold women’s purses.