When I was out in San Diego earlier this year for a trade show, it had been a long day on the convention center floor. Coupled with my legs hurting and my throat sore from talking, my allergies had been kicking my butt almost as soon as I got into San Diego a couple three days prior. While my colleagues in my company were going out for a group night at a go-cart track, I begged off saying that I felt like crap. I just wanted to go out, get a burger and a beer, and call it an early night. After having a couple beers in the hotel bar, I looked up to see if there was a burger and beer place near the hotel. I had just gone to Cold Beer and Cheeseburgers a couple days before (click here to see the Road Tips post on CB-squared), so I was looking for some other place. Another burger joint - All American Burgers - popped up in my search of restaurants near my hotel. I clicked on their website and immediately decided to head there for a burger and a beer.
Sean Shoja was born in Iran, but was raised in Montreal. Montreal has a thriving Jewish community and Montreal-style bagels are the rage with Jews and gentiles, alike. Sean Shoja got his first taste of working in a bakery/restaurant when he made bagels as a teenager. He later moved to Miami at the age of 23 to open his first bagel bakery. Sensing a need for good bagels on the west coast, Shoja moved to San Diego and opened Woody's Bagel Factory where his bagels were baked in wood-burning ovens. Shoja ran Woody's for three years before he sold out and looked for something else to do.
Sean Shoja set his sights on downtown San Diego and in 2005 he bought Café Lulu, reputed to be the oldest coffee shop in downtown San Diego. He kept the coffee, but added a hookah bar and Mediterranean foods served in the evening. Two years after he bought Cafe' Lulu, he bought another coffee shop at the corner of 5th and K Streets in downtown San Diego and turned it into Tuscana Café and Wine Bar. (Tuscana was literally next door to the hotel I stayed at in San Diego the two visits I've been there, but I have yet to go there.)
By 2012, Shoja decided to open a third restaurant in San Diego's Gaslamp District - a French-Asian restaurant by the name of the Red Light District. The concept didn't go over very well - the name probably didn't help much - so a year later he rebranded the restaurant as ViVa Bar + Kitchen, a Latin-themed tapas restaurant.
In 2016, ViVa Bar + Kitchen was changed over to a new concept - grass fed burgers with craft beers. Shoja brought in longtime San Diego area chef Tom Miller to oversee the new restaurant concept, and over Labor Day weekend in 2016 All American Burgers opened for business.
It was a five block walk up 4th Street from the front of my hotel to All American Burgers. (see map) It was a nice evening and even though I had been on my feet all day long, I was fine with the somewhat short walk. After entering the front door, I found a cozy little place with a large three-sided bar in the center of the dining area. Red lights underneath accented the front of the bar.
I decided to sit at the bar and the stools were made out of metal, high and slick. I damned near slid off the bar stool a couple times - and I was sober at the time! I was soon greeted by my server/bartender, a young lady by the name of Allison who had a familiar looking face. I couldn't quite place who she looked like, but it started to bug me as I tried to figure it out. (Later on, a couple sat at the bar and were ordering drinks. The lady turned to the man and said to Alison, "Oh, my God! You look just like Madonna!" I nodded my head in agreement, finally realizing who she looked like. Alison said that she got the comparisons to Madonna all the time.)
Alison dropped off a food menu and asked what I'd like to drink. The beer menu was on a blackboard on the wall behind the bar next to some flat screen televisions. It wasn't a big list, but it featured only San Diego area breweries. I ended up getting the AleSmith .394 pale ale.
Burgers are the main item on the menu at All American Burgers, but they do have appetizers, as well as a ground turkey burger, a grilled chicken sandwich, and a grilled ahi tuna sandwich for the non-beef lovers. Salads and a veggie burger were also available. All American Burgers gets their beef from Grass Run Farms outside of Greeley, CO., and all the beef is grass-fed with no antibiotics or hormones injected into the cattle. All burgers come with a 1/3 pound patty and are served on a brioche bun.
They have only 8 burgers on the menu and no way to be able to "build-your-own", so I was pretty limited in the combinations of items they placed on the burgers. They had a burger with a fried egg and a beefsteak tomato slice on it - I don't like the tomato/egg taste combination. They had a burger with avocado, tomato slice, white American cheese and bacon that sounded good, as did the Firehouse burger with fried jalapeños, pepper jack cheese, and a sriracha aioli. But I was trying to find something where the toppings didn't overtake the taste of the beef.
I ended up getting the mushroom and Swiss cheese burger. Alison tried to talk me into getting a side of fries - they were double fried French fries that were tossed after cooking in kosher salt, chopped parsley and parmesan cheese, then drizzled with a duck fat truffle oil. I don't know how I could have said no to those, but I've been really cutting back on potatoes and pasta over the past few months. It was a personal victory for me to not order the fries. (Or the pale ale-battered onion rings. Yow!)
The burger was brought out in a small baking sheet. (My wife and I invested in about a half-dozen of the 9" x 13" baking sheets a couple three years ago and they're so versatile for everything from baking Italian sandwiches, to toasting bread in the oven, to serving food on the deck.) The top of the brioche bun was branded with the All American Burgers logo. I thought it was a nice little touch.
The burger was delicious. The beef was lean, but it was still juicy. The Swiss cheese was melted over the top of the sautéed mushrooms, but neither took away the wonderful taste of the burger patty. About the only problem I had with it was the brioche bun - there was too much of it. I found myself tearing away parts of the bun while I was eating the burger because it was just too large and too much. But that didn't take away from the overall good taste of the burger, itself.
All American Burgers doesn't have a big list of burgers to choose from. But most of them are pretty interesting with their combinations of the grass-fed beef patties and toppings. The mushroom/Swiss burger that I got was very good, but the brioche bun was a little too much at times. The cozy little space was also lively, as were the bartenders who did a good job of taking care of me that evening. A good burger and a cold beer was all that I was looking for that evening and All American Burgers more than fight the bill for that.
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