Lab Results

Lunchbox Laboratory—Ballard’s new experiment in premium
hamburgers—was closed a week ago Monday. The handwritten sign on
the door said that the Laboratory was not in operation today because
the Professor—chef/owner Scott Simpson—was having

surgery. He’d be back on Wednesday. Surgery! It was a case of both
too much information (surgery plus restaurant does not equal something
you want to think about) and too little (what KIND of surgery?! the
mind perversely demands).

On Wednesday, while eating an enormous, dripping, and delicious lamb
burger with havarti and basil aioli (and sweet-potato fries, and
chocolate-mint shake—when in Rome, right?), I asked someone
clearing dishes from one of the two communal tables about Monday’s
sign. (Lunchbox Laboratory is tiny; it promotes conversation and
sharing—or, in some cases, oversharing.) Well, she said, the chef
had gastric bypass surgery, and this was for “some complication.”

“It was just in-and-out,” she said, “some kind of an infection or a
drainage thing.”

Simpson’s incredible— in the sense of not to be
believed—story is a lot to digest. On the phone, he’s extremely
candid about how comfort food almost killed him. He’s the chef who
opened Blue Onion Bistro (upscale comfort food/kitsch in a former gas
station on Roosevelt), then Fork on Capitol Hill (fine dining with
comfort food fantasies like lobster corn dogs). Fork closed after six
months amid Simpson’s burgeoning physical and mental health
problems—in the Seattle Times, he described holing up in
his apartment and eating Domino’s pizza for six months straight,
ballooning up to 469 pounds.

Finally he went to Mexico and got gastric bypass surgery, a medical
last-ditch effort for the obese: The capacity of the stomach is reduced
by 90 percent via the creation of a pouch-stomach, made from a
less-stretchy part of the original stomach. In Simpson’s case, the
pouch-stomach, he says, tore completely off inside him the day after
the surgery. The doctors fixed it, but Simpson was in a coma for almost
five months. “In November of 2006,” he says, “they said, ‘This guy’s
not gonna make it.'”

But he did make it, and now he’s making giant burgers. These are
burgers with the opposite of the usual problem: The patties are bigger
than the (not small, Essential Baking Company) buns. It’s your choice
of eight or so different kinds of organic, ground-on-site meat; 15
different cheeses; 15 different house-made sauces; and a half-dozen
more toppers (maple bacon, caramelized onions). Milkshakes,
no-lumps-style, are more humanely apportioned in 400mL lab glassware.
Then there are fries, twisty fries, sweet-potato fries, tater tots, a
variation on onion rings, and macaroni and cheese du jour (often penne
with blue cheese, though he’s made a 15-cheese version—good, he
says, but “a pain”). It’s order at the counter, with kitschy stuff
stuck all over the place, including a collection of vintage lunchboxes
(Lassie looking noble, the Six Million Dollar Man using an entire tree
to knock down some bad guys, “The Exciting World of Metrics”).
Customers gape at the chalkboard of choices, stupefied. Lunchbox
Laboratory’s big streetside sign says “The Art and Science of American
Comfort Food” with a drawing of a chef with a black eye.

Gastric bypass surgery works for overeaters like Antabuse works for
alcoholics: If a bypass recipient eats too much, what’s euphemistically
described as “discomfort” results. Simpson says it’s more like terrible
pain: “It feels like somebody’s stabbing me in the stomach.” His
portion size of his own wares: one-eighth of one burger. (He also still
loves candy, portion size: one Godiva chocolate. Too much sugar is also
terrible for gastric-bypass recipients, inducing “dumping syndrome,”
with cold sweats, extreme anxiety, stomach butterflies, then
diarrhea.)

If Lunchbox Laboratory sounds like a masochistic enterprise for
Simpson, he sounds genuinely happy. He can have a little bit—that
eighth of a burger—and it gives him joy to cook “everything that
I wish I could eat.” (The burger-shack idea is also, he says,
“something my mom always wanted me to do. This is for my mom. It’s an
homage.”) If it sounds sadistic—like he wants you to have to get
gastric-bypass surgery, too—he trusts you more than he could
trust his former self. He pictures people coming in once a week or once
a month. “Everything in balance,” he says. The lack of that was, he
says, his problem before. “You can’t live life without having a little
fun.”

The burgers are exceptionally good. If you’re amenable to the price
point—$7–$9, cheese an extra $1.50, sides $3–$5,
shakes $4, making it easy to spend more than $30 for two—you
might very well create your new favorite burger at Lunchbox Laboratory.
A suggestion for ordering: Keep it simple. The stronger cheeses and
sauces can overpower the fine flavor of the meats (like buffalo, prime
rib, and “dork,” or duck/pork). In this (possibly unique) instance,
bacon is overkill. And one side to share is more than plenty. Other
sandwiches sometimes featured as specials look great, like a massive
cheesesteak leaking off its serving platter of a midsized wood cutting
board. (Overheard: “I want to finish it, but I don’t know if I
can.”)

Simpson’s latest surgery went fine—they did, he said, an
endoscopy and removed a little metal straw that the doctors in Mexico
improvised during his complications to keep liquid from hitting his
stomach. It was an in-and-out thing. Say hi to him at Lunchbox
Laboratory. He’s lucky to be there.

bethany@thestranger.com