Look out Pick Quick, you have some competition.

That Fife drive-in burger stand long has been my go-to fast food burger of choice. Burgers with a from-scratch edict that extends to delicious hand-cut fries is the lure. But I always have had one quibble: The burger patty is too small.

Now enters the quarter-pound, juicy, meaty burgers at Lefty’s Burger Shack, opened July 23 by first-time restaurant owner Pam Hubert in a partially vacant University Place shopping center in need of crowds. And the crowds did come. Like the lines at Pick Quick, the 20-minute wait is worth it. Read more »

On opening day of Lefty’s Burger Shack last Saturday, she ran out of food. She ran out of food Sunday, too. On Monday, she served 450 burgers. Four hundred fifty burgers. In tiny restaurant terms, that’s like an indie band selling out the Tacoma Dome – small fish, big numbers. The line? Out the door.

“It was just insane,” said Pam Hubert, who has opened Lefty’s Burger Shack in University Place in a funky building with a cool history of burger lore. It was once home to Dairy Queen and Dairy Dell. News Tribune archives hint that Arctic Circle once called that building home, a few readers here remember it, too. If you’ve been by the building, you’d remember it. It’s octagon-ish and looks like it was built to be a burger shack.

Lefty’s is the culmination of a few years of work by Hubert (read this blog post I wrote back in June for the rest of the story), who runs the restaurant with her mother and two sons. Read more »

For six months, Pam Hubert has told curious passersby that she’ll be opening Lefty’s Burger Shack in “two weeks.”

This time, she means it.

The University Place burger restaurant has been Hubert’s working dream for two years, and all she needs now is health department approval to open. She expects that will come this week or next. The burger restaurant will serve Read more »