Terry's Turf Club is Still Rocking the Burger Game:

Before the Gateway Quarter took off, before Bakersfield or Kaze or Salazar--if you felt like some food that was worth the wait, you went to Terry’s Turf Club. 

Hey David, do you want to do something fun? You want to go to Taco Bell Terry's Turf Club?

Remember Terry’s? It’s a hard place to forget, and even harder to miss when driving by. Neon signs galore, a crowd snacking on peanuts outside and throwing the shells wherever, Terry and his faithful staff serving up burgers so massive you need to carve them up with a steak knife.

The sauces! The fancy ingredients served on paper plates! The craft beers in the Bevador refrigerators!

All of those are hard things to beat. David and I are ashamed to say it’s been a while since we visited Terry’s. Recently, I got the urge to go, and I wondered if much had changed at the restaurant since our prior visits. On our end, much had. We had different jobs, a mortgage, and my hair was various shades of purple.

I’m happy to report that Terry’s is just as great as ever, if not better. We sampled some of the menu items that we’d not tried before, like the tomato soup, which extremely rich and full of high quality parmesan. The paté (chicken liver, foie gras, cognac, shallot and creme fraiche), served with boozy apple and crisp ciabatta, was another enjoyable appetizer. And we had to get the halloumi with balsamic and tomato.

paté

Halloumi

One of the things I love about talking to Terry is that I always learn something. He brought out these tiny little root vegetables, called crosnes, which we’d never tried. We also sampled freshly grated wasabi (yeow!), and some 100 year old basalmic vinegar, which was amazing on fries.

Terry and wasabi

crosnes

As for our burgers? I decided to construct a BLTA burger, with mangalitsa bacon, avocado, tomato and lettuce. It was as good as I had hoped, just rather….large. Too large, even to fit in the takeout box I needed for the leftovers. We had to play MacGyver a bit and rubber band it shut.

Yes, that's a whole half avocado

David, attempting to be more reasonable, choose a mushroom option, with portabella and shitake. He ate the entire sizeable sandwich, and in combination with the various appetizers we had ordered, gave himself a pretty severe case of the itis.

only healthy in theory

The actual size of a regular burger you can get anywhere else compared to a TTC burger

While I was contemplating how exactly I was going to take a bite of my burger and not make a huge mess, the lady next to us at the bar piped up. “Excuse me, can I have an irish coffee?” She asked Terry. “Do you have decaf?”

Terry Scoffed. “Decaf, hell no. I do have the most expensive coffee in the world. Would you like to try it?”

That’s Terry’s Turf Club for you.