So Sara and I ventured over to Fuddruckers (warning, sound) by the East Mall (I swear, if you comment and/or email stating that the mall is now called “Harrisburg Mall” I will punch you in the face) for food and general sustenance after our second attempt at touring area coffee houses came to a grinding halt (note to self, check hours first next time).

I’ve never been to Fuddruckers. It can best be described as a hybrid self-service / full-service burger joint with a liquor license. You either get your food at the bar, or you sit at a different bar area and a server takes care of you. The prices are reasonable — my entree with two beers was under $10. Think Hardee’s, only with class. And table service. And beer.

I ate an ostrich.

No, really. In addition to regular hamburgers, they serve turkey burgers, buffalo burgers, and ostrich burgers here. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. My experiences with buffalo burgers and turkey burgers have not been positive, so I’m a little skeptical about eating a burger made of anything but 100% pure cow. I’ll make an exception for veggie burgers; they somehow manage to usually turn out pretty well. And lamb. Lamb always makes good anything. Gyros especially — have you eaten at Flamers yet?

So back to the ostrich. It was good. Really good. If you were to compare Hardee’s hamburgers to McDonald’s hamburgers, you’d get an idea of the difference between an ostrich burger and any other hamburger you’ve ever had. Let me put it this way: Fuddruckers has a huge toppings bar. Sliced tomato, salsafied tomato, broken lettuce, shredded lettuce, sixteen kinds of ketchup, a billion other sauces that I couldn’t wait to try, onions, pickles … you name it, it was there. Good stuff. Ordinarily, I’m the type to pile a ridiculous amount of toppings onto my burger, resulting in a Dagwood-esque creation of impossible proportions. Not this time.

As we approached the toppings bar, I thought about what would taste good on ostrich. Realizing that I’ve never actually eaten an ostrich, I decided to taste the sandwich first. I realize that it’s a faux paus to eat at the toppings bar, but I’m not about to ruin a perfectly good sandwich with the wrong toppings. I took a bite … and it was amazing. It was unlike anything I had ever eaten before. Entire worlds — nay, entire UNIVERSES were formed and destroyed around the flavor that began coursing through my central nervous system! Samuel L. Jackson has no idea what he is talking about — THIS is a tasty burger! I could fill my entire bandwidth allotment and every available bit of disk space on my server describing how incredulously, mind-boggingly, magnificiently great this burger was, and I wouldn’t even have begun to consider even the slightest possibly of scratching the surface of the issue. To have put any toppings on it at all would have been to violate and insult the very fabric of our universe.

Basically, it was pretty good.

Later this week we’re going to try the coffee house thing again. While I doubt I’ll find any coffee that even begins to come remotely close to the level of quality expressed in the Ostrich Burger (I must now capitalize, it’s that good), I’ll be sure to update with the results.