On a Tuesday around eleven-thirty, before the lunch crowd fills the parking lot off Veterans Parkway, the smell of cornbread already drifting out of Minnie’s — wait, let me start over, because I owe this place a proper introduction.
Ezell’s Catfish Cabin is already on this list, so let’s talk about a place that earns the same kind of loyalty through a completely different lane: the Sun Valley area of Columbus, where Wayback Burgers has quietly built a following among folks who drove past it a dozen times before finally stopping.
Wayback Burgers sits on a stretch of Manchester Expressway that doesn’t beg for your attention. The sign is modest, the building is modest, and if you’ve been burned by fast-casual promises before, you’d be forgiven for driving on. But stop. Order the Triple Triple — three beef patties, three slices of American cheese — and eat it at one of the booths inside where the AC actually works and the staff will remember your face by your third visit.
What separates Wayback from the standard burger chain experience is the shake program. These are hand-spun milkshakes made with real ice cream, and they take a few minutes, which means you have to slow down. The Oreo shake is almost offensively thick. The classic chocolate malt hits a note that tastes genuinely old-fashioned, not artificially nostalgic. You’ll pay somewhere in the nine-to-eleven dollar range for a shake, which sounds steep until you realize it’s a meal in a cup.
The fries are straightforward — thin-cut, salted correctly, better when eaten fast. The burgers themselves are cooked to order, which at a counter-service joint is a detail worth noting. You’re not getting something that’s been sitting under a heat lamp. The meat has char on it. The bun holds together. These are low bars to clear, maybe, but plenty of places don’t clear them.
Columbus has its BBQ institutions and its catfish spots and its sit-down Southern dining, and those things deserve every word written about them. But there’s a real population of people in this city who want a good burger on a Wednesday at noon without making a reservation or budgeting for a full restaurant experience. Wayback is for those people. It’s also for the high schoolers who pile in after the last bell, the construction crews who pull through the drive-through, and the retiree couples who come in on Saturday mornings because the shakes are good and the noise level is reasonable.
Prices are fair for what you get. A burger, fries, and a drink will land you around thirteen to sixteen dollars depending on what you build. The Triple Triple with a shake pushes closer to twenty, but that’s a lot of food. The drive-through moves quickly on most days, though the inside dining room is worth choosing if you want to eat without your steering wheel in the way.
It’s not the most interesting story in Columbus. But reliable, honest, and genuinely satisfying counts for something in a city that has plenty of both extremes — the legendary institutions and the disappointing chains — and not always enough in between.
