By Dennis Chu on January 22, 2014 • ( Leave a comment )

BURGER DELITE

Address: 5650 Edsall Road, Alexandria, VA 22304

: The sausage, egg, and provolone breakfast sub, accompanied by a mound of home fries.

Burger Delite is a place that I frequently drove by on my way to the post office near my apartment, where it’s nestled at an intersection surrounded by warehouses, car dealerships, and residential condos. I remember the first time I drove by it I thought to myself, “What is this ‘Burger Delite’ place?” and it piqued my curiosity. I came home and looked it up, to which I discovered that the place is pretty established, having been around since 1962 (although I’m not sure if that’s its original location for all 52 years since opening).

My friend Andrew and I will normally head out somewhere to grab breakfast the morning after our last night shift, and I saw from some reviews that Burger Delite had some good breakfast options. It was the perfect opportunity to go try this place, and we were joined by our friends Mark, Adam, and Joe.

When you first walk in, the ordering window (and kitchen) is right in front of you, with the restaurant’s large menu sprawled out above the window that you need a few moments to take it all in. There’s actually not too much seating inside the restaurant itself, with a bunch of the Plymold contour booths spread out to the right of when you first step in. The wall adjacent to the kitchen is where there are several commercial refrigerators lined up (presumably holding other food supplies); to the left of when you first walk in are the bottled drink refrigerators, containing juices and sodas.

I went with a breakfast sub loaded with sausage patties, two fried eggs, and slices of provolone cheese, with some home fries on the side. Mark was adventurous enough to order scrapple with his breakfast platter, and I think Andrew put it best when he said that “it tasted like animal.” (Here’s a link for those of you who might be asking, “What’s this scrapple you speak of?”)

Everything was prepared on a flat-top griddle, freshly made, and tasted pretty good for my expectations of eating out for breakfast. The cheese was nicely melted and both the egg and sausage were nice and moist. The home fries were excellent, fried up with some diced onions and weren’t dried out at all. I was also surprised at how much of the potatoes I got in that little box, too.

From my experience, Burger Delite is a solid no-frills breakfast joint that serves you up some good food very quick and for a reasonable price. There are certainly other breakfast sit-down restaurants you can visit if you’re looking for more of an atmosphere, but here it definitely strays more towards the functional mentality (like a place to stop for a quick breakfast or lunch while running errands). I’m sure that I’ll return for more breakfast in the future, but trying their lunch is also on my list of things to do as well.

Just as full disclosure: I got word from two people that I went with that said that they didn’t feel well after eating here. I felt fine after the meal, so hopefully it was just a one-time occurrence.

Here are my rankings for Burger Delite:

Food: 4.5 / 5
Lots of good options for breakfast and lunch (someone was smart to take a photo of their menu, since you can’t find it anywhere else). Food was tasty and left me feeling satisfied.

Atmosphere: 3 / 5
This one is kind of hard to quantify, since my expectations are set more towards the food and not much towards the atmosphere. I guess a plus is that there are plenty of windows that you can look across the street at all the BMWs parked in the dealer lot?

Service: 4 / 5
The woman at the register definitely expedites the process: she’ll be taking your order while she’s ringing up the person in front of you! The food did come out within 5 minutes though and was still piping hot right off the griddle.

Price: 4.5 / 5
All things considered, I think the overall pricing of the food is very reasonable. I felt like I was getting good value based on the amount I was paying; I’d certainly pay the $2.29 for those home fries again. They really were that good.

Overall: 16 / 20 (80%)