Lovejoy's Bar & Grill — Restaurant in Laramie

I don't know if Lovejoy's has a new cook, is under new management, or if I simply have have rose colored lenses of some previous visit, but I came here just on Tuesday over Thanksgiving break with my parents (not on Thanksgiving, luckily) as the Library and Crowbar both were closed, looking for a good burger place. My memory seemed to have indicated they had a maybe not spectacular, but decent burger, however... this visit was a sad testament to pub burgers.

Entering the establishment, it had the smell of an alcohol infused Friday night party in the year after graduating high school. I do admit I've gotten past the age of such festivities, and so, while it did bring back some good memories, it didn't exactly feel like leaping for joy to be bringing in my parents from out of town, and this was a Tuesday at 5 o'clock, not a Friday late at 11pm. Granted, I live in a college town, and college kids need their bars too, but I had remembered it being at least worthy of a casual bite. It felt uncomfortable. But I could chaulk that up to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

However, all of this could've been forgiven, had when the burgers come out, a burst of flavor and juicyness of fresh beef had come.

Man, was it a let down.

I ordered the BBQ onion ring burger, my dad got the regular cheese burger. When the plates came out, my eyes were assaulted by a sad burger topped with a pool of common place BBQ sauce, with garnish on the side. I wasn't aware BBQ burgers normally came with garnish, as who ever would think drowning their lettuce and tomoto in a soup of generic BBQ sauce was palatable is beyond me. BBQ bleeding out of every orifice of the burger, it was like holding up the Hoover dam behind an ocean of uninspiring, generic BBQ.

The server had asked me how I would like my burger, but i saw very little point in asking when the quality of the food was no better than a high school cafeteria. The burger itself was only barely above the quality of a ten month old frozen patty hastily thrown onto a grill without seasoning, and dropped on a plate when it'd been "a while". A 10 year old could cook a better meal than the burger I had. No flavor, and the buns untoasted, pulled straight from the bag. A dribbling mess of mediocrity. The fries were at least "somewhat" decent, they had some flavor, though they tasted more like oil than hearty potatoes. Honestly we could've done better with fast food.

I mean, you're saying this is a "Bar & Grill", no one's grilling anything, more like, "Bar & Nuke".

For anyone coming here to actually enjoy a burger, I would skip it, and go to some open community outreach in town offering "free burgers", because it will most likely be as good, if not better than these burgers.

The only consolation was that beer was made available to try and forget about the horrendous culinary meal you were made to...

Our experience of Love Joys was definitely sub par... It seemed to be okay when we first got there, they asked us if we wanted the game on as we both had Packers stuff on, and that was great. I ordered the chupacabra burger with fries, and a bison patty which was a mistake. The very nice waitress asked how I wanted it cooked and I told her medium... Well when it came out the "fried egg" on it was super hard and overcooked, and definitely didn't resemble being cooked in a frying pan, and the burger was way over well done...that's not even the worst part. My girlfriend had the Cobb salad, and it just wasn't great. Nothing much to say about it but just wasn't very appetizing after everything thus far. Well then she went to the bathroom, and after coming out of there she definitely didn't have an appetite. She said the bathroom looked like it hasn't been cleaned in a year and the toilet was horrendous... Yuck. I finished all my food, because I was hungry even though the fries were hard and over cooked. My gf barely ate any of her salad. After everything i still tipped the waitress 20 percent, becuse she was very nice and treated us well but we definitely will not be back until the kitchen can get things under control as how they're supposed to be. It definitely could be good, it's a sweet little spot next to the train tracks and it could definitely be great and I will try it again in the next few months when I'm...

Somebody threw up on my husband (all over his sweater, jeans and tennis shoes) in the bathroom after clearly being over served mimosas on Saturday at 3 pm in the afternoon. Middle of the day, seriously?

The supervisor proceeded to giggle at the situation when they approached our table to apologize. What an inappropriate way to handle an absolutely ridiculous situation. Nothing funny about this scenario. Clearly your mid day Saturday leadership is not mature enough to handle the job. Thanks for the $10 off of our bill- it really helped us pay for new tennis shoes for our weekend of visiting laramie for my husband.

Additionally, overheard the supervisor approach the table where the young man had come from who threw up all over my husband and explain that she wasn’t mad at them but they needed to close out the bill. One plus side for asking them to leave but so many other steps were handled incorrectly and honestly just completely infuriating. I used to love this place when I was in college. What a dump it has turned into now.

If this is how they handle mid day Saturday business I don’t want to imagine what their kitchen and food handling practices are...