Sonic Burger – San Marcos, CA
The UBR staff has long been awaiting the grand opening of Sonic Burger in San Marcos. Of course the timing was perfect because it was Greg’s turn to buy, because he was a big stupid loser, and also it gave the cheap whiner the opportunity to use a coupon he has been holding on to for over two years. For this review, we invited Amanda (a.k.a. Poops) to be our official guest reviewer. Sadly, Poops may have flushed her chances for any future reviews. The highly coveted UBR Associate level potential may have swirled right down the toilet. This is all because she failed to do her homework of studying past reviews and she also lacked the ability to provide us a mobile burger review app for free.
Sonic’s format is unique in the fact that you have three serving choices. You can go through the drive through, pull up to the mini squawk box and eat in your car, or eat outside and order from one of several land-based giant squawk boxes. The multitude of choices caused a serious dilemma with Mike who had to circle the parking lot to figure it all out. It was like being in a burger round-a-bout. The center of the grounds consists of a building that resembles a bank with tinted windows and a door with an ‘employee’s only ‘ sign that servers on skates would come bursting through. This is a bit disturbing as you don’t get the opportunity to see your food being cooked. For all we know the roller skate servers are bringing us repurposed feral cat burgers.
The excitement for our burgers was quickly stalled when we decided to try and place our order through, what can most easily be described as walk up ATMs with a Siri that has the mental capacity of a six year old. And when you pair a burger-image-covered talking ATM with Meatsack Mike, the confusion was near instantaneous. All we wanted was a few lousy burgers. After about ten minutes of agony and numerous confirmations of our order, we were pretty confident we had success.
After finding a picnic table on the front patio, our roller skate server quickly arrived with our food, greeted us with a smile, and gave great service. But even after all the inane dialog with the ‘ATM’, the order was wrong. This made us wonder, why couldn’t we have just placed our order with our roller girl? As we ate, there were roller skaters zipping all over the place demonstrating their mad rolling skills. Of course this instantly gave Troy the idea of returning next time with a sack of pebbles to scatter around to provide entertaining carnage as we dined.
But enough of the fun and games…we know you are dying to find out what we thought of the food! Well, our loyal burger fans, the burger rated a strong 3 out of 5. Not that that’s a bad thing. The UBR staff is tough and a 3 is a “meets expectations.” However, it needs to be pointed out they did have a 4 in the very important “beef quality and flavor” category. And the fries? They were pretty good too. But, by far, the most impressive thing was the tater tots! Yeah! TATER TOTS!!! Tater tots cooked to delicious perfection none the less! Unfortunately, believe it or not, Sonic had a near complete fail in the portion category that dragged the score down to a 2. It was more along the lines of what you would expect from a stupid kids meal. Have you seen Mike? You can’t give that giant Meatsack a kiddie portion and expect a smile. That boy could stuff a train load down his gullet if he wanted.
So, suffice it to say, Sonic was a bit of a disappointment. But we’d like to extend a special thanks to Poops for partaking in our most recent quest for the Ultimate Burger. And you’ll be glad to know that she gave the ‘Post Burger Experience’ rating a nice ‘solid’ 4 out of 5 stars.
