San Francisco Blog

The Urban Cowboy: Excessively accesorized

Urban Burger 581 Valencia (at 17th St.), 551-2483.
You can practically smell the ambition here, a burger joint open barely two weeks. The concept has all the signs of incipient burger empire, and why not? The owners' extended family can claim Toast in Noe Valley and the Grind Café in the Haight. Like Custom Burger on Seventh Street, the game here is customization: Pick a patty, weigh in on cheese, toppings, a spread, and bun. If free choice is anathema to you (or that last pint at the Phoenix has rendered the wall-mounted menu board nauseatingly swirly), you can opt for one of 10 prefabs. We chose the Urban Cowboy, as extravagantly accessorized as its flesh-and-blood namesake. The disc of antibiotic- and hormone-free Angus beef was squelched under a Baroque pile of bacon, onion rings, cheddar, and barbecue sauce, but -- really -- what did you expect? The real disappointment was the La Boulange bun, squishy as angel food cake, rendering the burger as hard to wrangle as a calf swathed in chiffon. Still, Urban Burger reaches for quality on a stretch of Valencia better known for cheap and fusty. We'll show up again, even when we're not likkered up.