Lunchbox Laboratory: Lab Coat Necessary

Opening the door to Ballard's Lunchbox Laboratory, I spotted my lunch date just on the other side, huddling back from the burger line, staring at the room as if she were a rabbit and it were a pair of 60-mile-an-hour headlights. "It's a little . . . overwhelming," she explained.

At first, I thought she meant the décor: In terms of square footage, there isn't much to the 15th Avenue burger shack—just a slim row of tables against the front windows and a tiny back kitchen, with little room between—but there's sure a lot to look at. Every surface is studded with metal lunchboxes from obscure television shows, vintage signs, and more tchotchkes than my grandmother ever owned—a gen-X version of the old rusty-farm-tool décor espoused by family-friendly restaurants of the 1970s. Had I encountered Lunchbox Laboratory in my days of collecting macrame patterns and Tammy Faye Bakker memorabilia, I'd have hyperventilated so hard my brain would have overoxygenated and shut down before I ever looked at the menu board.

But that menu board, the size of a ping-pong table, stretching from shoulder height to the ceiling and dividing the "dining room" from the "kitchen," was the obstacle my friend was referring to. Covered in writing, it's the Lunchbox Laboratory burger-creation toolkit: At publication time, the lab offered six patties, 14 cheeses, 14 sauces, five extra toppings, six sides, and four varieties of salt. That's not to mention the two additional boards around the corner, one advertising the daily chef's specials and one listing a couple dozen flavors of shakes.

Since there's only the width of a 747 aisle separating burger aspirants from a tetanus incident with a rusty lunchbox or an intimate encounter with the person seated behind you, you have to stand very still and lean back to study the menu, as if you were at the base of the Space Needle trying to spot a friend waving at you from the SkyCity lounge. Meanwhile, chef Scott Simpson and his line cook are calling orders to each other on the side of the board, co-owner Allegra Waggener is brushing past you to deliver plates and pressing you for your order, and you can smell the fact that a lunch rush is going to hit in five minutes.

That kind of overwhelming.

Nevertheless, Lunchbox Laboratory is a prime example of Seattle's exciting new batch of microrestaurants. Men and women with three- and four-star culinary training, who a decade ago would have been plotting their own Marco's Supper Club or Brasa, are now opening smaller and smaller places—both physically modest bistros like Dinette or Sitka & Spruce, and even more tightly focused microrestaurants: farmers market stands; Skillet Street Bistro's mobile kitchen; Capitol Hill's minuscule Taco Gringos; and a goor-may burger joint like Lunchbox Laboratory.

Not a few people bitch about how precious and pricey these microrestaurants are—for example, a burger meal at the Lab will set you back three times as much as one at Dick's—but the reason I love this trend is that it democratizes "fine dining," scuttling the kind of hierarchy that decrees that one-star restaurants (charging one-star prices) only produce one-star food. Sure, Simpson's "just" making burgers, but he wants to make the most incredible burgers you've ever ordered. The other reason I get excited about microrestaurants is that many of the most amazing dishes I've eaten outside the United States have been cooked on propane burners set up on a sidewalk, sold to me by someone whose livelihood was to make one dish and one dish alone, perfecting the knack until it came to them as unconsciously, and as surely, as walking up a flight of steps.

Simpson's story of how he came to open his burger joint is a hand-to-mouth telenovela. Making his reputation at Blue Onion Bistro, where his mac 'n' cheese got him some national attention (he recreates the feat at Lunchbox Lab, served as one of the sides), Simpson moved up to the experimental Capitol Hill bistro Fork, which opened in 2006. The stress of running the place did him in: As the local rags have chronicled, when Fork closed after just a few months, Simpson shut himself in his house, gained a few hundred pounds, sought stomach-bypass surgery in Mexico, and ended up with life-threatening complications. He recovered both physically and mentally, fell in love (with his now-fiancée Waggener), refurbished an old burger stand himself, and returned to making imaginative comfort food.

I do think Lunchbox Laboratory needs to make a lot of tweaks to its formula—and stop terrifying first-timers—but I also think Simpson's got the chops and the creativity to accomplish them. Even the difference between my first sandwich and my third was revolutionary. On that first visit, I blanked at the sight of too many choices and went with the "almost reuben" listed on his daily specials board: a corned-beef patty served with "baconized sauerkraut" (have two sweeter words ever joined the English language?) and million-island dressing. Neither the chef nor I had thought through the fact that ground-up corned beef won't actually hold together in a patty, nor that the combination of bacon fat, sauerkraut juices, and mayonnaise-based dressing would saturate the bottom bun, making it fall apart and slick my hand with a thick layer of grease every time I tried to pick it up. It was disgusting. Had my date's buffalo burger with blue cheese, bacon, and caramelized onions not been obscenely tasty, I might never have gone back.