Birds and Burgers — Restaurant in Alabaster

Birds and Burgers masquerades as a restaurant from the exterior, but upon entering you will find a cramped and confused eating space with competing aurally stimulating devices vying for your sanity. The primary goal of this establishment appears to be speed. The majority of the building's footprint is dedicated to it's F-250 accessible drive through, you will quickly notice. Going through other reviews, I see buzzwords like "quick bite." And quick bite would, unfortunately, be a generous term to use when you consider the time it takes to chew through one of their burgers. Spongy is the word that came to my partner's mind. My mind, of course, knew for certain that Samuel L. Jackson would never opine the tastiness of one of these burgers. A Big Kahuna this burger joint is not.

I struggle to come up with an aspect of the restaurant that I actually enjoyed. The exterior color is garish, the food is bland and not worthy of the life it took to create the food, the mac and cheese was overcooked, the servers were nice but artificially so, and god forbid the health department makes their way in there. The employees had masks loose around their ears while sticking their heads out from behind the glass, and there wasn't a chance in Alabama heat that the tables were 8 feet apart.

The place is also an ecological disaster, if you care about the longevity of mankind or that sort of thing. I could populate a landfill in a couple of weeks with the sheer amount of single use waste that Birds and Burgers provides with no hesitation or inquiry.

Suffice to say, I'm being generous with 2 stars only because I was not physically harmed by this establishment. However, this location will surely overstay it's welcome in Calera as it does provide sustainance in an expedited manner.

I will not be returning to this eatery in the future, and I don't recommend you go at all. It is truly abysmal. I can say I was not disappointed by the french fries, but even McDonald's can slop out a decent container of those. So, slurp it up Calerans! The future of fast food is now!

Edit: Hello, owner of Birds and Burgers. I respect the chutzpah it took to reply to my review. I also respect your entrepreneurial spirit. Ultimately, my expectations of a restaurant are different to others, and if your customers enjoy your establishment, I think that is a beautiful thing. However, for my liking, this is not my type of place. Truly, I do not believe my review will have affected your staff in the long term, but in the case that I did, I apologize to the staff. They are just doing their jobs. They were actually pretty nice even if it was a little too much southern charm for my personal liking. Have a safe evening. I hope my verbosity did not entangle your staff for too long. Treat them...

Before I say anything else and before you look at the other really divisive reviews. Let me just say this. DO NOT ORDER DRIVE-THRU. I've been here 4 times, even on drive thru and pick up. Both times using the drive thru the food has been lower quality than it was when I simply picked up from the window. The service is not as friendly in drive thru and is overall much slower, taking up to 5 minutes to get an order out. Was quite dissapointed using drive-thru to get lower quality food than the first time. I can see why many are giving bad reviews on first impression. The Drive-Thru is simply inferior to the pick up window in every possible way.

Now, simply parking and ordering from the pick up window is an entirely different story. I've been very happy with the food both times I used the pick up window. The fries are some of the best from a grab & go joint when using the pick up window (using drive-thru they are below average). The burgers and chicken tenders are also quite tasty. The service is very friendly, with the cashier taking the time to remember who I am as a person and giving recommendations. On top of this, they always bring me my food in less than 2 minutes after I've made an order.

One last thing to warn about though is if you are like me and only care for mild spicy foods, don't let them trick you into thinking their spicy chicken sandwich isn't that spicy. While it's not the hottest thing to ever exist, it will be uncomfortable to eat if you only like mild spiciness.

Alright, that's all I have to say. It's very good if and only if you use the pick up window. DO NOT...

Overall the food was ok. The ordering process was simple with an estimated time of pick-up. Unfortunately, I had to wait 20 minutes past the pick-up time. In addition, they were no longer offering the fried turkey (hadn’t removed it from the menu yet) and had to substitute it with chicken.

The staff were friendly and helpful when after I double checked the order, there were a few items missing and promptly got them.

Now the food.. I got the B&B Famous fried chicken (dark). While the chicken skin had a great and satisfying crunch, the chicken was over cooked and dry. The flavor was good. My side of Mac and Cheese was cheesy but a little bland and some of the sauce had started breaking, leaving it a little oily, so it had either been sitting for a while or the ingredient proportions were not correct. The biscuits were burned.

My wife’s chicken, gravy and rice bowl looked good and the portion was good. The taste was ok, a little salty, and spicy, but it balanced well with the bland white rice.

My daughters burger was great, the meat was fresh and it was cooked to a nice medium.

My sons chicken bites looked good and he ate them with no complaints.

Finally, the milkshakes were ok, not really mixed well and my wife’s chocolate shake was lacking chocolate.

Overall, it was ok, would I go there again? Maybe. It is a newer restaurant, so I’ll give it a...