<i> WAAHHHH!</i>

The Shack is loud on a Sunday afternoon, quite loud, with four sporting events playing on four screens, Bob Seger pounding from the stereo and a bar four deep with tan dudes shouting at the top of their lungs: WAHHHHHHHH. A surfer guy comes in and bellows, “Somebody’s got my seat, maaaan ,” and a smaller man slides off the end stool, combining an “allow me” gesture with an exaggerated bow. Everybody there seems to know which seat the surfer means. He swaggers to his stool, pats it and starts to scream with his buddies before he so much as orders a drink: WAHHH WAHHH WAHHH .

There are some women here, even some beach moms with children, in the small cluster of tables near the food counter, but few seem unescorted: The Shack is a manly place, a place that hosts Jagergirl promotions, a place where you can watch the Dinah Shore Golf Classic on TV and drink a rusty nail.

You work your way to the bar. The bartender honks “Carls berg “ and slides you one frothing mug of beer and then another. On your way back to the table, you try not to slip on the sawdust that covers the floor.

The Shack is an archetypal beach hamburger dive, a crowded joint in the heart of Playa Del Rey with a sister restaurant on Oahu, an all-shorts dress code and a weathered-wood nautical roadhouse vibe that looks as if it’s been too long from the sea. Bright flyers advertising Mexican Night, Spaghetti Night and cheap Saturday-night Prime rib specials paper the walls, though most of the clientele seems to treat the food as something convenient for soaking up the beer.

The Shack has something of a local reputation as a biker bar, though it’s not the kind your parents worried about (sometimes, though not often, it seems more like a Loyola Marymount jock hang). Better your parents should worry about the implications of the Early-Bird Secial, which means you get a dollar off your burger if you eat it at 10:30 a.m.

Patty melts are sweetened with great gobs of Beaver mustard; guacamole burgers are greased with spicy green glop. A Fire in the Hole slicks two open-face hamburgers with house-made, kidney-bean-rich chili, the kind of stuff that can repeat on a guy who likes his beer. A Shroom burger is garnished with fried mushrooms and Swiss cheese. Fries, the crinkle-cut kind, are generally fresh, crisp and good.

But the basic unit of exchange at the Shack is something called the Shack burger, a quarter-pound of ground meat and a Polish sausage crammed together in a bun. The sausage is ruddy, garlicky, grilled crisp; the hamburger patty is charred in a way that you may associate with back-yard barbecues, totally carbonized but oddly appealing in its acrid blackness, kind of dense, extremely well done. There is lettuce, mustard, grilled onion on request, all the usual stuff, and a cold bun that tastes right out of the package. The Shack burger seems repellent on the surface and will seem repellent an hour after you eat one--especially if you help it down with bargain tequila shooters--but at the time, it is irresistible, all grease and smoke and snap. The Shack burger: dude food without peer.

The Shack

185 Culver Blvd., Playa Del Rey, (310) 823-6222. Food served daily 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Cash only. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $8 to $14.