Even if you don’t look like a jock, you can still eat like one. At Jimmy V’s Sports Café, in fact, you can load up on the same grilled fare as some of the best student athletes in the country.

Due to its location in the Arrillaga Family Sports Center on Campus Drive (opposite Maples Pavilion), athletes frequent the café on their way to and from practice. From 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., the café opens to the rest of the public as well, with a variety of burgers, hot sandwiches and drinks.

In short, the café excels at being ordinary. Walking in, you might suspect you’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in a high school cafeteria, misled by the tiled floors, fluorescent lights and conventional round tables. The menu, too, will remind you of others; Jimmy V’s sells burgers and tuna melts, and every order can be upgraded for a nominal fee to include a side (fries, onion rings or a small salad) and a fountain drink. Upon entering, my mother waxed nostalgic about Sports Café’s striking similarity to Luncheonette, a diner in Miami she visited weekly with her mother en route to Five & Dime. Before you reconcile Sports Café to complete diner obscurity, however, you should taste their burgers.

My mother considers herself somewhat of a burger connoisseur after a lifetime of burger consumption. She rarely finishes her burgers (my dad happily intervenes), but she’s tried at least half of them all — Houston’s, Fuddrucker’s, Outback... you name it. At Jimmy V’s Sports Café, even she learned some new tricks. At the counter, the server caught her off-guard with an extensive list of cheese options — “we’ve got everything,” she told my mom. Later, at our private round-table for two at the window, she devoured every last crumb — cheese and all.

“It’s ample,” she said. While she acknowledged that “hot and juicy” was a burger cliché, she applied it regardless. Cliché or no, Jimmy V’s Sports Café makes a hot and juicy burger.

For those less interested in burgers, the Sports Café offers plenty of alternatives, from the equally hot and juicy (hot chicken sandwiches, tuna melts, etc.) to the decidedly cooler wraps and smoothies. The former comes with a customizable form, allowing you to choose the meat (or cheese, if you want the vegetarian) and fillings that include everything from cream cheese to salsa. I ordered the chicken salad variant with romaine lettuce, red bell peppers, and avocado ($5.95). While I was disappointed in the proportion of the wrap innards — the “avocado” was a smear on the edge of the tortilla and the red bell peppers were diced and sparse — the wrap itself was hearty and neatly sliced into two manageable halves on the ceramic dish. In the future, I’ll pass on the chicken salad (any flavor the shredded white meat had was easily overwhelmed by the glut of fluid mayonnaise), but the turkey and pesto combinations looked promising. The smoothies, while less customizable, also offer slight deviation from the classic flavor blends. What’s more, the smoothies all have names familiar to the Stanford student. The “Arrillaga,” for example, fuses apple juice, strawberry, banana, blueberry, peach and ice for only $3.95. The café also offers hot entrée specials (when I was there, they served roasted salmon, pasta with marinara sauce and rice) and full Peets Coffee accoutrement.

While the dining experience is more ‘diner’ than ‘café,’ Jimmy V’s dazzles with its mastery of old favorites. Besides, even if Jimmy V’s was shooting for accuracy with its name, ‘diner’ sounds about as Stanford as the golden bear. For burger fans, Jimmy V’s Sports Café is as good as it gets.