The Blue Plate is a great downtown Chattanooga restaurant near the Tennessee Aquarium that serves great, fresh local food!
I love spring more than words can say. Not quite as much as I love summer, when I live in shorts and tank tops and flip flops and get to pretend that I’m a full-time blogger…but spring is when I feel like I am coming back to life after the winter cold (I despise winter as much as I love summer). It’s been so rainy around here lately, which has put a bit of a damper on my excitement about the warming trend, especially since I spend such a large portion of my day driving.
Anyway, this past Saturday was gorgeous, sunny, not exactly warm, per se, but warm enough that I could wear just a cardigan over my t-shirt and not feel like I was going to freeze. To celebrate, we headed down to the Chattanooga Riverfront. That’s the other thing I love about spring-my city is beautiful all year, but when the warmth returns, it springs into its full glory (Bradford pear trees excluded….my sinuses are killing me. Plus I hate those things after the one that we used to have in our front yard broke in half and fell on top of our house. The damage was minimal but we promptly removed it and replaced it with a perky dwarf magnolia).
We decided to go sit on the patio at The Blue Plate, which I first wrote about in 2012. You guys! That was when Chattavore was still a baby blog. I decided that we needed to go back so I could check out their burger as I get ready to revamp my burger list. You guys might be seeing a lot of burgers and revisits for a while, but normal blog activities will resume once I do my list update. I think I owe a lot of places a second visit anyway…it’s kind of fun to go back and see if things have changed and if so, how!
There wasn’t much thought that went into my order. Double-stack cheeseburger, with two house-blended beef patties, American cheese, toasted local (ahem, Niedlov’s) bun, house spread, and pickles, served with hand cut chips. The chips were good, albeit a little under seasoned. The burger was surprisingly (I’m not sure why surprisingly) delicious. It was a very simple, classic, diner style burger that tasted like it was cooked on a flat-top…a little crusty from the cook on the outside and still very juicy. The American cheese was simple, perfectly melted. I’d give it a 4 for meat (well cooked, well seasoned, very flavorful), a 5 for bread, a 4 for cheese (American wouldn’t be my first choice but works great here), a 4 for toppings (minimal, which I have decided is pretty ideal because it lets the meat shine through; the house spread was a little bit sweet and a little spicy-delicious), a 5 for structural integrity (i.e. because of the minimal toppings, the burger held together very well and the bread didn’t slide around at all), and a 3.5 for size (a little on the small side, but I really didn’t mind because I didn’t feel bad about eating the whole thing!) . Overall, a 4.25 out of 5. Impressive!
Philip decided to get the famous fried chicken wrap, with the Blue Plate’s famous buttermilk fried chicken, shredded lettuce, diced tomato, mixed cheese, house cheese sauce and all wrapped in a flour tortilla. It was gigantic and had a good balance of ingredients. That fried chicken-wow! It’s delicious. Philip really enjoyed this wrap, which also came with chips.
Since I’ve never really heard anything about Blue Plate’s burger, I didn’t really think of it as a contender for top burger, but I was really amazed by how great the burger was!
The Blue Plate serves really great, high quality food with as much local food as possible. And they don’t have a microwave in the building, which makes me happy.
We really enjoyed our meal and our first opportunity to dine outside in 2015. I’m looking forward to more opportunities like this…and more burgers! By the way, our bill was just under $20 before tip.
The Blue Plate is located at 191 Chestnut Street Unit B, Chattanooga, TN 37402 (across from Ross’s Landing and the Tennessee Aquarium). They are open Tuesday-Friday, 7:30 a.m.-9 p.m. and Saturday-Sunday 8 a.m.-9 p.m. You can call them at 423-648-6767. Check out their website, theblueplate.info and their menu. You can like The Blue Plate on Facebook.