Searching for the perfect hamburger is not unlike questing for perfection in ourselves.

It is an endless and often intense journey, sometimes fraught with peril, with an elusive goal that perhaps cannot truly be achieved.

But where’s the fun in not trying?

To be clear, Fat Jack’s has not achieved burger enlightenment. But the restaurant-bar certainly elevates the area’s burger offerings.

MENU: Fat Jack’s

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Tucked away in a nondescript strip mall, Fat Jack’s, 120 W. South Boundary in Perrysburg, serves seriously good food that belies the joint’s aesthetic as your average neighborhood sports bar.

Yes, Fat Jack’s has pool tables and a large bar area, ’80s music wafting through its smallish dining and drinking area, and several wall-mounted flat-screen TVs cycling through whatever passes for sporting events at this point. But when the order arrives, one tends to forget the run-of-the-mill ambience and instead focus on a dish of food that is pleasing to the eye and, more importantly, to your mouth.

After a quick perusal of the menu for our first visit, our table settled on a dual-appetizer order of Jack’s Chicken Wings with a side of ranch ($7.99) and Cheesy Burrito Bites ($5.99) served with salsa. These quintessential bar-food appetizers were quick to the table and just as quickly devoured, and spurred all-around enthusiasm for the next round.

The Fat Jack Burger — a pound of ground beef split into two patties, and topped with Swiss, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and the creamy-spicy Fat Jack’s Sauce — is a visual monstrosity that does the gullet good. (What it does to the heart is a different matter.) The Fat Jack Burger is $9.99 and comes with your choice of fries, homemade chips, or tater tots, but pony up an extra dollar for a split order of one of the above teamed up with beer-battered onion rings.

Switching to chunky peanut butter and adding a few pinches of Cajun seasoning could make the surprisingly subtle peanut butter bacon cheeseburger ($7.99) a must-order item.

The grilled ham and cheese — sliced ham topped with melted Swiss cheese on marble rye bread ($6.99) and served with crispy golden tater tots — was a favorite, while the patty melt, a juicy patty smothered with Swiss cheese and grilled onions on grilled marble rye bread — a nice addition — ($7.99) was good but not exceptional.

For our second visit, a late Saturday afternoon lunch, we arrived just in time to learn that the kitchen was closed for the next two hours during Fat Jack’s normally slow dining period. We left and returned on a different day for another dinner.

As with our first visit, our waitress was chatty, friendly, and quick to the table with menus, drinks, food, and refills.

For our appetizers, we tried the Blazing Jack Chunks ($8.99), grilled all-white chicken meat tossed naked in Buffalo sauce and served with your choice of dipping sauce, and pretzel bites ($6.99), breaded soft pretzels filled with jalapeños and gooey cheese. The Jack Chucks were the standout; the breading is not missed on these sauced-up and delicious fork-sized bites.

The juicy single-patty in the barbecue bacon burger ($7.99) was perfectly cooked, its center slightly pink, then smothered in not-too-sweet barbecue sauce and topped with cheddar cheese and a thick onion ring nearly as big as the burger.

Mixing it up on the slightly healthier side, the Cajun chicken sandwich ($7.99) with pepper jack cheese was a tasty diversion from the red meat, while the grilled chicken salad ($8.99) was a cornucopia of colors and tastes: mixed greens, tomatoes, onions, beets, cheddar cheese, croutons, sunflower seeds, and dried cranberries. As good as the salad was, equally impressive is that it was made in the same restaurant that prides itself as “Home of the World Famous Tankard.”

So maybe the size of its beers have made Fat Jack’s famous. Having some of the best burgers in town, though, won’t hurt its reputation, either.

Contact Bill of Fare at: fare@theblade.com.

First Published July 21, 2016, 4:00 a.m.