By Dennis Chu on February 25, 2012 • ( Leave a comment )

D.T. KIRBY’S

Address: 644 Main Street, Lafayette, IN 47901

Good burger places are hard to come by. Great burger places, now those are even harder to find. D.T. Kirby’s serves some phenomenal burgers.

D.T. Kirby’s does offer a number of different items, including hot dogs, sandwiches, and salads. But the two items that I have always heard about from this place are the hamburgers and hot dogs, and what crazy things they are piling on top of them to create some truly delicious combinations. I truly admire a place where I open the menu and I am stumped for a good five minutes, thinking about what exactly I want to get because everything sounded so amazing. Here are a few just to give you an idea:

Grilled Cheese Cheeseburger: Two grilled cheese sandwiches, acting as the bun, around a patty with lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, and special Mayo
Pretzel Burger: two soft pretzels acting as the bun on a patty covered with cream cheese, hot mustard, and a sliced pickle
Da Bear (doing this one from memory since it wasn’t on the main menu): Burger covered with barbecue pork, coleslaw, lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles

And that is just a sampling of the menu. You can see why you might want to try out all the burgers on the menu (your health and physical well-being can certainly take a backseat for this).

When the burgers all first arrived, they looked great, and made your mouth water almost immediately. I took my first bite out of my Grilled Cheese Cheeseburger, and it was fantastic. The burger itself had great flavor to it and was cooked really well. The grilled cheese sandwiches certainly made for a great supplement, and surprisingly so did the cucumbers with their refreshing, crisp taste. I expected a lot of these burgers to be very greasy from their descriptions, but I have to say that I was surprised at how clean a lot of them were. I asked my friends around the table about what they thought about their burgers, and they all said the same thing: delicious. The fact that everyone finished these huge burgers was also a testament to that.

The thing that we did spot on the front of the menu that got everyone curious was two words: food challenge. When we asked the owner (I think Don is his name), he pointed us to one picture of a burger that looked it could easily be level with my face when I sat down at a table. He then proceeded to describe that for the challenge, one would have to eat the 3.5 pound gargantuan of a burger in 20 minutes to complete the challenge. Jaws dropped when he showed us the picture, but they dropped even further when Don went on to lay out what all went into the makings of it. I didn’t catch the name of the challenge, but I’m going to go ahead and call it the Monstrosity Challenge.

2 out of 100 have successfully completed the challenge? Kyle Loux, Bennett Olson, let’s raise that success rate to 4.8%.

Here are my rankings for D.T. Kirby’s:

Food: 5 / 5
With the fantastic choices and great tasting dishes, you will never leave this place hungry and will always want to come back (for the intrepid eaters: to take down the next item on the menu).

Atmosphere: 4 / 5
For a place that started as a bar with some tables and expanded to include a dining room area, it’s not too bad. A casual ambiance to enjoy some food with friends or family.

Service: 4 / 5
Our waitresses were very attentive about refilling our drinks and checking in on us during the course of the meal.

Price: 5 / 5
I thought that for both the quality and quantity of the food, it was a very reasonable price.

Overall: 18 / 20 (90%)