Mini-review: The Rohrbach Burger

This is gonna be quickie since I didn't have my camera with me and I wasn't taking notes, but I thought I would write up my impressions anyway.  Recently I ended up at Rohrbach's Restaurant, an extension of the excellent local brewery, and of course I had to try the burger.  I had vague memories of eating their "Heart Stopper" burger (topped with bacon and a fried egg) in the distant past, and was anxious to try what I hoped would be a good pub style burger.  When I checked the menu, my eye was drawn toward "The Rohrbach Burger" and I ordered it under the assumption that something named after the brewery would be a good choice.  But to quote Samuel L. Jackson as Mitch Hennessy in the Renny Harlin retardo-classic "The Long Kiss Goodnight" - "When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you and umption." 

In my burger ordering excitement I had failed to scrutinize the menu thoroughly and missed a detail that would have certainly made me alter my selection: it seems The Rohrbach Burger is "served on a large grilled hard crust Italian roll."  Oh.  Oh.  So my main issue with this thing is it's actually not really a burger at all.  It's more of a big sandwich that has some oblong ground beef inside.  The bread was good, similar to what you get at DiBella's, and the beef was high quality, but overall this whole concept gets a thumbs down from me.  First, the process of forming the patty into the weird long sub-sandwich shape seemed to have negatively affected the texture, as it was somewhat mealy.  The other downside of this goofy patty was uneven cooking - its inevitable that the ends of this patty end up overdone (which happened in my case) or the center underdone.  Apart from those issues, all my usual problems with using hearty sandwich-style rolls for burgers are just magnified by this giant, crusty, dense roll.  I'm not ruling out Rohrbach's yet, but the fact that they have dubbed this sandwich "The Rohrbach Burger" doesn't give me a lot of confidence in their other offerings.  On the plus side the beer-battered fries were above average and The Vanilla Porter I had with my meal was great.