There’s tons of places to eat around LA, so it’s been difficult for me to choose. Especially when it’s always on me to pick. And I’m terrible with decisions. I thought I would like a burger, so we went to the Counter. It’s a BYOB – build your own burger. There’s even a paper form, and you fill it out with what you want on it.
They have milkshakes too, and I had to indulge in a banana one. Props on this shake, with actual real bits of banana in it.An order of half sweet potato fries and half onion strings, served with 3 different dipping sauces. J was all over the onion strings and I scarfed these sweet potato fries. They were so damn good.
My burger on the honeywheat bun had meat, along with grilled pineapple, grilled onions, lettuce, and tomato. There are tons of weird stuff you can put on it, but I’m fairly simple. My sauce of choice was sweet bbq. I’ve been loving having bbq sauce on my burgers lately. I liked my burger a lot, but it’s hard to eat. They make the meat patties really high and fat, so it’s quite difficult to fit the darn thing into your mouth. You can also get your burger in a bowl, and now, I can see why. I just have to say that their grilled onions were alone worth the price of admission.
J got the counter burger, which is one of their signature burgers. It’s got provolone, fried onion strings, sauteed mushrooms, lettuce, tomato, with a sun-dried tomato vinaigrette. When we went, the place was packed. We sat at the counter so we didn’t have to wait. People are crazy about their burgers, eh? While the food was good, it seemed way too pricey for let’s face it folks, just burgers. But if you don’t mind that, then go ahead and try it out. It’s a chain, so who knows, you may find one near you yet.

While in Silver Lake, I took J to Intelligentsia to get his caffeine fix. I’d read about it on another food blog and it had come highly recommended. Look how cool this place is. Even though I don’t actively drink coffee (you know, my caffeine problem), I’d hang out here cuz it’s just cool. I love their logo.
It’s a company from chicago, and they buy, roast, and sell all the beans themselves, and have a handful of retail outlets where they schlock coffee to fiendish hipsters. I believe this is the only shop outside of the Chicago area. I don’t know about the coffee, but I liked that the shop was roomy. It wasn’t one of those teeny tiny places where everyone has to squish in. They must have good coffee, there was quite a line. And people kept going on and on about how it’s the best coffee they’ve ever had.
Behold a latte. I like it when they do fancy stuff with the milk, or froth, or whatever that stuff is. There were some chairs on the inside, well, more like stools. But mostly, it was open space. As with most places in california, there is decent places to sit outside. And of course, wi-fi. Sure beats starbucks any day of the week.

We did some roaming around on Saturday and went to the Silver Lake neighborhood. It’s a pretty cool neighborhood, just northwest of LA, with lots of little shops and restaurants and such. We also ran smack dab into their little farmers market. We were hungry, so after walking around a bit, we stopped into the Good Microbrew & Grill. We saw lots of people eating outside, so it seemed like a good choice.
I totally forget the name of this dish, but it is a corn pancake on the bottom, black forest ham on top of that, with two over easy eggs on top and then maple syrup dotted all about. This was delicious! And so different, but in a good way.
I got the huevos rancheros, which were awesome. The ranchero sauce was great, and came on a corn tortilla. It was served with rice and beans and some chips, all of which was also good. Also got a little bit of pico de gallo and guacamole with some warm flour tortillas on the side, which I was also a big fan of.

Service was good and friendly. We sat outside and it was very pleasant. The food came out surprisingly fast. They had a ginormous beer selection, but you know, it was saturday morning, and not quite time for boozing, so we had to pass. It was a good random selection.