Whatever audience is being targeted here, I'm not in it.

The Lava Lounge (conveniently located right behind my house) is doing a food thing on Mondays (see above) and Tuesdays (tacos!). If hanging out in a cramped, darkly lit crossbreed of Geiger's basement and Peewee's Playhouse, paying premium rates for drinks and chowing down on bar food is your thing, then the Lava Lounge is certainly worth looking at.

Personally, it's not my thing. I've been mortared out of the place at least twice by the horrid, vacuous droning of the medieval torture device they call a "jukebox," and many more times by the even more horrifying experience that is an all-request 80s DJ*. And while I'm sure marketroids would sling about words like "cozy" and "intimate" to describe the interior design, I personally lean towards vastly more accurate terms such as "cramped" and "claustrophobic." It's hard to do a neutral writeup of the place, considering it features several of the bar elements I seek to avoid (such as the South Side "hipster" crowd, for example, which leaves me clutching for my flamethrower and brass knuckles at every encounter).

I like the aesthetic of the Lava Lounge, honestly - the interior design is pretty neat, some of the employees are really cool, it's owned by my landlords (so I get a slight discount on some things) and overall it's a very pleasant venue until people start showing up en masse.... which is a natural side effect of things like Meatball Mondays, Taco Tuesdays and 80s Night. It just can't hold a substantial crowd, and it gets huge points off for that in my book.

If you like quirky atmosphere, have mainstream musical taste and can stomach large numbers of people in a very small space, you'll enjoy the Lava Lounge.

* Friday night is 80s night. If you get there early he'll play the good stuff... but the second the fratstains and sororisluts start pouring in, the output changes from Post Punk and Proto-goth to The Cure followed by James followed by The Cure followed by just about every hit single on the list of "reasons we left the 80s behind" followed by The Cure AGAIN. Combine music you can hear on the radio any day of the week with peroxide blondes with the already claustrophobic interior and what you have for a few hours is no longer the Lava Lounge, it's the Robert Smith Tribute Bar. Vastly Less of The Cure is the major reason I get my 80s on at The Upstage.

Restaurant and bar. Convenient.

They have a web site and the bathrooms are downstairs. Plenty of space, open kitchen/grill thinger, plenty of (smaller) TVs running sports and canned vaguely non-offensive radiopop on the PA. My brain clocked Genesis, Pet Shop Boys, Def Leppard, Talking Heads, Men At Work and then the Meat Death Star showed up, medium well, and I promptly stopped caring about the music and took a serious interest in calculating my stomach capacity.

That's the best of a few shots, none of which took well. The ketchup and beer bottles are present for scale. I'm not fucking around with scale comparisons here - when I say the burger was a Meat Death Star, I meant it. We're talking something thicker than your normal good-sized Real Burger and roughly twice the length. Lettuce and smoked bacon and chedder and the whole thing melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

I hit the place around 3pm- I'm not into crowds, especially Oakland crowds, and it turns out I hit the place at a fairly slow point. Some sort of Norm analogue in sandals and a Dream Theater 2002 tour tie-dye and a few other barflies, some sort of sororithings that waitstaff had the decency to keep me well clear of. Service was average for what you're getting (A Real Hamburger, none of this Toms Diner injection-molded short order grease), prices were on the high end of what I'm used to (2.50$ for a botle of Yuengling and 8$ for the burger and fries - but that pile of biomass is worth every. Single. PENNY, I promise.), the environment smells great (open oven/grill thinger, see previous and web site), and overall the quality of the experience is just as good if not better than it was the last time I was here - June 18, 1999 with Mike B and company, killing time in the hours before grajimikating from AIP.

Tasty. The beer did a number on my "exotic" constitution, but it seemed like the thing to do in a place like this and was doubtless a hell of a lot cheaper than liquor would have been - I still have sticker shock from Ray's and the overall vibe is on about the same level.

It's in Oakland, it's fairly easy to find, and I haven't had a burger this frigging good since the last time I ate here, six years previous. I intend to expose xeno to the place when he visits, as he's in a position to give an informed opinion on the beer selection, which was heavily emphasized and made about as much sense to me as Chinese or Hebrew script.

Update, 20050916 : (a) the burgers are still awesome, and (b) their kitchen is open until one. Dig it.