LA Taco Blog is one of my must-reads. I’m WAY out of its demographic, practically none of its topics are written with anyone of my middle-class unhip ilk in mind, and it covers people, events, things in areas of the greater LA/SoCal region I rarely if ever visit, but I enjoy the hell out of it anyway. It’s like sitting in the back of a clubhouse fulla koolkidz who don’t care you’re there while they talk shop and share shit.

So it was that on a recent click over to their site last month, I found a post extolling the virtues of an eatery called Corner Burger, which is so named because it sits on a street corner on 147th Street a block west of a street called Hawthorne Boulevard. In a city called Lawndale. Which is all a big “Huh?” to me.  You have to understand: up until I googled the place’s address, I had no idea where Lawndale was. A native angeleno and I had not a clue. That’s the way it was and is for me and much that region. I just don’t get out there (unless crawling along the 405 around the South Bay Curve counts — and it doesn’t).

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It tastes a lot better than it looks.

Here’s how you can tell I’m not originally from California: I don’t like avocado on my burgers.

Really. I enjoy avocado in general. It’s nature’s answer to butter. And I’m the guy at the party who sits down on the couch and makes sweet love to a bowl of chips and guacamole until everyone in the room is staring. But I just don’t think avocado and burgers mix. Something about the cool smoothness of the avocado manages to distract my mouth from the burger and the remaining toppings, and then my mouth gets confused and angry and resolves to keep saying stupid things, like that maybe a flat tax wouldn’t be such a bad idea, or that those jeans aren’t doing my girlfriend’s hips any favors.

So I avoid avocado when I’m ordering burgers. I also avoid iceberg lettuce, but for entirely different reasons I’ll get into another time.

Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about avocado when I go to Five Guys Burgers & Fries, one of the most recent east coast transplants. A smallish, DC-based burger chain best described as In-n-Out East, Five Guys was voted “best burger in Baltimore,” which is a great endorsement, if only because it allows me to imagine that I’m eating burgers and fries with Omar Little or Bunk and McNulty.

Five guys (fairly) recently opened up a restaurant in Carson, so I decided to give it a try after spending my Sunday morning with a crowd of kindergartners and their parents for reasons I’ll get into another time. The verdict? While In-n-Out probably won’t be losing market share anytime soon, Five Guys is goooooooood.

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