Some of you may have been expecting a review of The Spotted Pig. Well, plans change. Bareburger ended up being the choice for a variety of reasons. First, because it’s coming to Santa Monica, which makes it more relevant to the focus of this Project. Secondly, it was voted the best burger in New York City by the New York Post. Lastly (and admittedly, probably most importantly), it’s really, really close to Julie’s apartment, and we were hungry.

I went with Dec, Brittany, and Julie to see what this place was all about. I know this is neither here nor there, but they should consider serving beverages that sound less like deviant sex acts. I’m sorry, but asking whether I want my beer with a cinnamon rim, or if if I want to follow my burger with a hot honey milkshake? Leaving aside that I said yes to both, that’s creepy and weird.

The Place
Bareburger
313 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

The Order: Bareburger, elk patty, aged cheddar, country bacon, pickled jalapeños, stone mustard, tomato fig jam

The Price: $15.25 ($8.80 base; $1.10 for elk; $1.20 for cheese; $1.65 for bacon, $0.75 for jalapeños; $1.75 for tomato fig jam)

The Burger
Okay, so it’s quite possible that I got suckered into the whole gimmicky meat phenomenon here (if there is such a phenomenon), because I saw elk and didn’t think twice about it. One might accuse me, therefore, of missing out on the “typical” Bareburger experience. I don’t know. I’m just anticipating here.

I think anyone who so accused me would be wrong, though, and here’s why. My feeling is that the central (purported) virtue the Bareburger model is that there is no “typical” Bareburger experience. Part of their schtick is that you could go there a few times a week, and never eat two burgers that were even remotely similar to one another over the span of at least a couple months. Bareburger gives the diner the yoke, and with it, the freedom to, as James Mercer wrote, fly the whole mess into the sea.

So you have ten choices of patty (beef, bison, elk, wild boar, duck, grilled lemon chicken, sweet potato and wild rice, black bean, and farmer’s quinoa), four different buns (brioche, sprout, tapioca rice, or a collard green wrapping), nine cheeses (Colby, aged cheddar, pepper jack, manchego, queso fresco, gouda, pimento, amish blue, or vegan cheddar), three bacons (country, duck, or brisket), fourteen garnishes (alfalfa, green leaf, spinach, red onions, tomato, dill pickles, spicy pickles, pickled jalapeños, chickpea onions, stout onions, pickled red onions, sweet pickles, pickled green tomatoes, and wild mushrooms), eleven sauces (mayo, ketchup, buffalo sauce, stone mustard, special sauce, habanero mayo, paprika mayo, horseradish remoulade, curry ginger ketchup, smoke sauce, and buttermilk ranch), and five spreads (spicy pico de gallo, piquante relish, pineapple relish, tomato fig jam, and guacamole).

I know. It’s a lot. Take a minute. I’ll wait.

Now, it’s not clear to me that there is such thing as “too much choice,” but if there is, Bareburger is getting there. At some point, the thrill of customizability is outweighed by the overwhelming multiplicity of options. Decision trees become labyrinthine tangles of equally appealing options. Alternatives become conceptually indistinguishable. And before you know it, you’re more exhausted than you were after dragging your suitcases to your friend’s fourth floor walkup (that was a New York joke).

For that reason, it’s a little tricky to review Bareburger, per se. I can tell you how the burger I got was, as long as you understand that there is statistically zero chance that you order the same one when you go. I can tell you the elk was prepared with surprising facility, which indicates to me that they know how to work with these meats. It’s nice to know that it’s more than just a gimmick. These patties are prepared thoughtfully.

On the point of thoughtfulness, though, I have to return to the abundance of choices. With so many meat, cheese, garnish, sauce, and spread options, it becomes pretty clear pretty fast that Bareburger is concerned more with quantity than synergy. That is to say, they’ll wow you with the amount of options they have, but there’s no guarantee that any assortment of toppings will work well together (Julie, for instance, was less pleased with her choice). It’s that uncertainty that distinguishes Bareburger from other, superior build-your-own outfits.

But going back to my burger, the cheddar was generously portioned, a thick and bubbling sheet atop the elk. The bacon was rich and smoky. The sauce and spread were uninspiring: the mustard was too scarce to make an impression and the tomato-fig jam was a little insipid. Both were lost in the proverbial shuffle. The jalapeños had no heat, so they were essentially duplicative of the pickles, which themselves were a touch on the sad and soggy end. All told, the toppings were good, not great, and reinforced my nagging suspicion that Bareburger is more committed to quantity than to quality.

I went to Bareburger hungry, and left sated. Was it worth the three-minute walk from Julie’s apartment? Yes. Was it worth the $15.25 price tag? Less yes. Would I be confident that I could get an equally good burger the next time I went, regardless of what I ordered? Not at all yes. So…no. Bareburger’s vast array of toppings pits garnish against garnish. And they don’t always work together well. Ultimately, the abundance of items gives rise to some weird tragedy of the commons, where ingredients stand alone rather than collaborating to form a coherent whole. That makes Bareburger an inconsistent roll of the dice. If you’re feeling lucky, go for it.

The Ratings
Flavor: 8.40 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.00 / 10.00
Value: 7.10 / 10.00
Efficiency: 7.00 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 9.20 / 10.00
Bun: 8.00 / 10.00
Patty: 9.10 / 10.00
Toppings: 7.60 / 10.00
Sauce: 6.50 / 10.00
Balance: 8.00 / 10.00

Total: 79.90 / 100.00

If anyone ever tells you that The Office Burger didn’t change the game in a completely fundamental way, point them in my direction. Sang Yoon’s restaurant is an institution at least, and a nascent empire at most. First, Father’s Office paved the way for Californian craft beers (way before it was hip), offering all of Anchor’s beers, and later Sierra Nevada and a bunch more.

Then, the Office Burger came along and revolutionized things again. More on that in a minute.

This place is famous enough for banning ketchup and stubbornly refusing any and all substitutions. It’s also a famously nightmarish logistical enterprise – i.e., good luck getting a seat. In spite of all this, Father’s Office is the darling of the denizens of Santa Monica. It is their flagship burger, often-imitated but never matched. They will tell you it’s not just the best burger in Santa Monica – it’s one of the best burgers in the country – NAY, the world.

It may have been obvious that I was going to go here, but Father’s Office falls pretty squarely within the category of “things that people in Santa Monica overestimate just because they’re in Santa Monica.” Let’s be clear, if Father’s Office was just in Culver City, nobody in Santa Monica would give one single shit about it.

It’s important, then, to tune out the Santa Monica exceptionalist noise when you go to Father’s Office. One of the best ways to do that, it turns out, is to go to the one in Culver. So Jules and I did just that after she fit me for an absurd suit. We managed to alienate basically everyone around us, and actually accomplished something I previously thought was impossible: we were so repellent that one party actually gave up their table to avoid being next to us. File that under “unprecedented things.”

Anyway. Let’s talk about this titan.

The Place
Father’s Office
3229 Helms Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90034

The Order: The Office Burger (no substitutions, obviously), medium-rare

The Price: $12.50

The Burger
So like I said above, Father’s Office made the fancy burger cool in Los Angeles. Before Sang Yoon dropped this culinary bomb on all of us, you’d have been laughed out of a room for putting arugula on a burger. But put arugula on a burger Yoon did. And caramelized onions, and gruyére and Maytag cheeses. All on a roll – yes, a roll, not a bun. The beef is dry-aged and deeply flavorful.

Yoon gets credit for being the first to fancify the burger. But he does not get credit for being the best. This burger is an unbalanced, inaccessible mess. The arugula dominates early in each bite, profoundly bitter and dry. It tips into the grainy gruyére, the complexity of which is too big an ask following the harsh arugula. The onions close it out, almost too sweet and very sharp. On the finish, the bitter garnishes melt into the sharp cut of the crisp exterior of the patty, leaving very little time to enjoy the delicious, dry-aged, medium rare perfection of the patty.

I don’t use the word “perfection” lightly. So let’s be precise. This is not the best burger in Los Angeles. Not even close. It’s not the best pub burger. It’s not the best fancy burger. It’s not the best craft burger. It’s not the best “gourmet” burger. It is a strong competitor for the best patty in Los Angeles. Sadly, the stellar piece of beef is is crowded out by a bunch of harsh toppings. The toppings are all of superior quality, but they don’t complement one another well. The burger skews too far in the direction of the bitter, the sharp, and the complex. Ultimately, all this makes the burger worse in spite of the beautiful piece of beef. To this patty, I would quote the Bard of Generation X: “You are not to blame for bittersweet distractors.” (Bonus points if you got the reference without Google.)

As it happens, Father’s Office’s unwillingness to make substitutions is reflective of a broader philosophical resistance to change. This burger has failed to adapt with the times. It has failed to compromise to mitigate its shortcomings. While the burger scene has evolved and developed around him, Sang Yoon has dug in his heels and served up the same deeply flawed burger for the better part of two decades. This burger made Sang Yoon famous. Now, it’s holding him back.

The Ratings
Flavor: 7.70 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.80 / 10.00
Value: 8.20 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.50 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 9.00 / 10.00
Bun: 8.00 / 10.00
Patty: 10.00 / 10.00
Toppings: 6.90 / 10.00
Sauce: 9.00 / 10.00
Balance: 7.80 / 10.00

Total: 84.90 / 100.00

One of my readers told me she was excited to watch me tear New York a new one in this featurette. A few things were noteworthy to me me about that: 1) people read this, 2) I talked to a girl! and 3) she thought I hated New York, and 4) she thought that whatever distaste I have for the city made my negative evaluation of even its best burger a fait accompli.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not nominating myself for a Peabody Award here (that’s your job). When it comes to journalistic integrity, I’m probably more Brian Williams than Walter Cronkite, and probably more Perez Hilton than either one. And sure, sometimes sentimentality gets the better of me. But still, I care about burgers a lot. And my love of burgers is the prime mover here. If the burger is good, I happily will say so.

Having said that, I’m all about context and background, so a comment on the city is in order. There are enough people who sing this city’s praises. So I figured I’d go all Scalia Dissent on the city that never sleeps.

Los Angeles is a wasteland.

It’s a wasteland of casual, laissez-faire cavalierism. It’s a wasteland of surf-salted hair and impromptu long weekends. It’s a wasteland of often-silenced phones and a pervasive repudiation of The Professional Grind. It’s a wasteland where startups will soon outnumber hedge funds, law firms, and consultancies. It’s a place where people go to pursue absurd and wonderful dreams (I want to sell my company to Google, I want to be the next next next James Bond, I want to host a late night show, I want to make chart-topping surf-rock records, et cetera). All that comes with a certain amount of vapidity and obsessiveness about appearance. Our cold-pressed, low-calorie, gluten-conscious, Runyon Canyon hiking, beach-blown lifestyle certainly is not for everyone. I mean, I write a burger blog, for Christ’s sake. You can imagine what I go through here.

But New York is a wasteland as well, and it’s a harder kind of place for me. It is a wasteland of self-satisfaction, of misplaced self-importance, of tall buildings housing diminutive and myopic ambitions, where long hours produce short lists of impactful achievements. It is a place where the best legal minds mire in structuring mid-market bond offers. It is a place where the smartest minds are perverted by the warped minds of the finance world into thinking that mortgage-backed securities are a good idea. Is there more to it than that? Sure. But investment houses and the legal market made New York the center of the universe. Sorry guys, but it’s not your bustling non-profit scene. Just like Los Angeles was built on the back of the entertainment industry, New York lives and dies by high finance.

For every still-exceptional person I know doing exceptional things in New York, there are quite literally thousands of people living life on autopilot, grinding away in some investment house moving around the idea of money. It is a wasteland of squandered potential. It is a place where people get paid to abandon their aspirations in magnificent buildings. It blurs people’s vision with enough fatigue, velocity, cocaine, and booze to make them mistake their paychecks for their dreams.

Where Los Angeles is caked in makeup and exudes laconic superficiality, New Yorkers have the untreated edge that attends an unwavering belief in one’s own superiority. New York, they’ll tell you, is ancient Rome for the modern age. That may be true. But it’s also ancient Rome for the modern age. Here, they drink on Tuesdays because running shit for the whole globe is tiring. In Los Angeles, we drink on Tuesdays too, but we do it to numb the creeping, paralytic hopelessness that stems from our deep, collective insecurity. Boom. AMIRITE U GUYZ?

Anyway, um…right. Moving on.

There’s a weirdly hostile condescension in the way many New Yorkers talk about L.A. To hear them tell it, Los Angeles is a quaint, sun-soaked, beachside hamlet where they make porn. Well, I’m here to set the record straight: Los Angeles is a sprawling, sun-soaked, beachside metropolis where they make porn. So there. And, might I add, a lot of New Yorkers seem to be attracted enough to it. Or repelled enough by New York.

Now, let’s be fair for a second (but only just): I don’t hate New York. I just reject the narrative of unrivaled excellence that seems to have taken hold in the collective consciousness of the city. It’s true: New York is magnificent. I spent my time there in awe of the scope of its greatness, and that awe persists to this day. Without question, New York the greatest city on the face of the planet. It is the ne plus ultra of human achievement. New York is, without qualification, a vastly better city to visit. But also without question, when it comes time to set down roots, Los Angeles is my kind of wasteland.

Why? Because this. And this. And this. And this. And more even-handedly, this.

So how does this all relate to burgers?

Well, New Yorkers pride themselves on having the best of everything. And when it comes to Italian food generally (and pizza specifically), they’re right. They’re the best at those things. The worst slice in New York would be well above-average – maybe excellent – in Los Angeles. A downright mediocre Italian restaurant in Little Italy would absolutely donkey punch nine out of ten similar presentations here.

So New Yorkers also like to think their city has the best of the burger war. Given my passion for Los Angeles burger-craft, I had to put this claim to the test. After soliciting recommendations from my Facebook friends, I decided to check out a couple places. The first was Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridien. This spot isn’t exactly a habitual haunt for native New Yorkers. Even so, once upon a time, it was hailed as the best burger in New York. I went with Declan and Brittany to check it out.

The Place
Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridien
119 West 56th Street
New York, NY 10019

The Order: Cheeseburger with “the works” (lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard)

The Price: $8.73 (not including fries [$3.90], a Coke [$2.53], and a milkshake [$6.43], for a total of $21.59)

The Burger
From the moment you walk in, one thing is obvious: Burger Joint is trying really hard. It’s artificially cramped. You can write on the walls, which gives it kind of an “aw, shucks” vibe…until you notice there’s one wall reserved for famous people to write on. Which is less “aw, shucks” and more “look how cool we are!” They’re blasting Classic Music from the 1960s, which really reinforces the Genuine Old School Vibe.

The almost impossibly unfriendly staff serves with practiced impatience; they criticized the manner in which I ordered the burgers, which took about 1.4 seconds longer than our cashier would have liked. After yelling at us for not picking up our order, they gave us the wrong order. Then, not sheepishly enough, they presented us with the food we did order…minus one milkshake.

Not to sound like an annoying, entitled Yelper, but I see red when unfriendly service is not counterbalanced by German efficiency. Be a dick if you must (though, must you?), but you better good and goddamn well get my order perfect. And if you’re going to yell at me, it better not be for nothing. My rule is that I’ll be as reasonable and solicitous as the staff – I’ll meet them right in the middle. So I don’t demand absolute perfection from the staff at a restaurant…unless they demand it from me.

Anyway, that gripe aside, let’s get to the food.

This patty is a mix of top sirloin, shoulder, and chuck. All the meat is freshly ground in-house on a daily basis. The patty is not heavily seasoned nor inherently particularly flavorful; the main source of flavor is the grill. And it does impart a hell of a flavor. The patty’s was infused with the aroma of char and smoke. Cooked medium rare, it was a juicy, just-bloody-enough, smoky delight. The one drawback is that, at five ounces, it’s kind of meager.

The cheese was a hybrid of Colby and Cheddar. I’ve long thought that not enough restaurants incorporate multiple cheeses into their burgers, so this was a refreshing presentation. The cheese was perfectly semisolid, neither too messy nor too stiff, and just melted enough to let the Colby and cheddar bleed into one another. By blurring the boundary between the slices, Burger Joint creates a delicious amorphous cloud on top of the patty that rounds out the burger wonderfully. Colby is basically cheddar that hasn’t undergone the cheddaring process (which gives cheddar cheese its lower whey content and denser texture), the combination of the two cheeses essentially eases you into the crumbly, sharp richness of cheddar. It’s a remarkably simple – but totally brilliant – touch.

The garnishes were all pleasantly fresh (especially the tomato – swoon), but poorly arranged in the burger. Specifically, the razor-sharp tangle of red onions were placed almost entirely on one side, making that side overwhelmingly, well, zippy. On the other hand, it gave the burger a sort of narrative arc: you start slow with the mellow, sunny burst of tomato, and work your way towards the gregarious, brash onion. That would be cool, if it didn’t feel completely unintentional.

The price also bears mention. This was a really, really expensive meal. But the burger itself was not outrageously expensive in and of itself, but it’s still quite expensive, pound for pound. Almost nine bucks for a five ounce burger is pretty steep.

All told, the gripes above are relatively minor. This is a fantastic burger that is well-deserving of the praise it gets. I finished this burger inside of ten minutes. It is eminently edible, and each bite commands another. There is something to be said for a burger you just can’t stop eating, and Burger Joint definitely provides that much. So, if you can stomach the silly and contrived milieu, the oppressively unfriendly staff, and the unreasonably long wait, make the hike to the West 50s and give this burger a try. You’ll see what the fuss is about.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.60 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.50 / 10.00
Value: 7.30 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.40 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 7.30 / 10.00
Bun: 8.40 / 10.00
Patty: 9.60 / 10.00
Toppings: 9.70 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.70 / 10.00
Balance: 9.30 / 10.00

Total: 87.80 / 100.00

Lest it be heard that I have insular tendencies, I have ventured – in these months of unstructured leisure between the bar exam and the proper beginning of my gainful employ – to explore other parts of the country. The next few posts to follow (and a few more later in the month) will trace my travels in the Far East.

Let’s get one thing out early: If you haven’t been to Philadelphia, you absolutely should go. This is one of the most surprising cities I’ve yet been to. It’s got the charm of Charleston without the silent-but-way-real stigma against interracial dating. It’s got the brick-lined bustle of Brooklyn without the impenetrable cloud of self-congratulation. And if you do go, you should be so lucky as to have tour guides as enchanting as mine – none other than the incomparable Kevin and Rumi.

The first stop was Parc, a Parisian belle epoque revival shop by Stephen Starr, who apparently owns, I don’t know, every restaurant in Philadelphia? Okay, that’s not true, but he owns twelve. Plus two satellites (Morimoto and Buddakan) in the meatpacking district in New York. It’s all disgustingly hip. Anyway, Parc. Tables lined the street, overlooking scenic Rittenhouse Square. Far-flung from the bustle of New York, you could almost hear yourself think.

The three of us stopped for lunch at this picturesque spot. I ordered a burger. Because after all, what do Americans do at charming French restaurants? We order cheeseburgers, damn it. So I’ll tell you about the one I ate, while resisting the temptation to replace every “f” with a “ph”. One thing’s phor certain: It’ll be a stiph challenge!

Okay, I won’t do that anymore.

The Place
Parc
227 South 18th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103

The Order: Cheeseburger

The Price: $16.00

The Burger
Philly’s first offering was a simple one: a pretty substantial patty (our waiter was too busy having a rad man-bun and wearing rad sunglasses and being rad to tell me anything about the composition of the patty besides, “It’s ground beef”) was wrapped in a bubbling cloak of raclette cheese (raclette, a semi-hard melting cheese, is known for its nutty acidity – imagine a softer, oilier gruyère, and you’ve got the basic idea). In the center of this cheese-coated disc sat a tangled mound of caramelized onions.

There was no sauce, save for the ketchup on the side. This seemed a conscious attempt to bring the interaction between the beef and the cheese to center stage. The onions played a largely supporting role here, offering a faint glimmer of sweetness that peeked out coyly from behind sharp bitterness. The beef was juicy and rich enough, cooked to a timidly pink medium-rare. There is no taste of grill here, which, along with the raclette, reflects the ultimately tragically French sensibilities that doom this burger to mediocrity.

At the risk of getting a little too “big picture” here, the best burgers stand out in part because they balance ingredients so well. These ingredients seem like they were put together for all the wrong reasons. Here’s how I imagine the composition of this burger going down:

“Okay, everyone, this is a restaurant in Philadelphia. We need a burger.”
“But it’s a French restaurant…isn’t a burger a little incongruous?”
“Hmm. Interesting point. What if we put a bunch of French-sounding shit on it?”
“Yeah, yeah. That’s smart. Maybe, like, French onions?”
“Exactly. That’s a good idea because it has the word French in it. What about cheese?”
“I don’t know. How about raclette? That’s the Frenchest-sounding cheese I know.”
“Gruyère?”
“Hmm. Maybe. But, to be fair, I said raclette first.”
“Yeah…that’s a really good point. Let’s do that. Okay, what else?”
“I don’t know. I just googled ‘French sounding food’ and didn’t come up with anything.”
“Shit. Oh well, that’s probably good enough. Great work today.”

My point is that this burger is less a carefully constructed synthesis of cooperative ingredients and more a menagerie of things that sound like they’re “French” (leaving aside is that raclette isn’t French). It doesn’t require culinary training to intuit that a burger needs more than meat, onions, and cheese to pass muster. Not to sound jingoistic, but there are some things that are uniquely American – and uniquely un-French. If Parc is any indication, the cheeseburger may be one of them.

The Ratings
Flavor: 6.90 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 8.40 / 10.00
Value: 5.50 / 10.00
Efficiency: 7.30 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 6.10 / 10.00
Bun: 8.50 / 10.00
Patty: 8.50 / 10.00
Toppings: 6.70 / 10.00
Sauce: 0.00 / 10.00
Balance: 6.80 / 10.00

Total: 64.70 / 100.00

In 2012, Chick-Fil-A’s President and Chief Operating Officer, Dan Cathy, went on The Ken Coleman Show and voiced his opposition to same-sex marriage. The corporation, it was revealed, donated money to groups that opposed same-sex marriage.

A total shitshow followed. Never before had chicken sandwiches been so prominent in the public consciousness. Chick-Fil-A became an avatar for bigotry to progressives. Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston, said he would prohibit the company from opening franchises unless they disavowed their statements. An LGBT ally went to a Chick-Fil-A drive-thru and verbally assaulted a Chick-Fil-A employee in the name of tolerance. It backfired.

Boycotts and sit-ins ensued. The Christian right launched a strident, artery-clogging counterattack, spearheaded by none other than America’s most affable maniac: Mike Huckabee. They crowed about the victimization of white Christians (which…um…). Millions of people lined up outside Chick-Fil-A restaurants all around the country to show solidarity with a company that, in their view, had been unfairly maligned. It’s anyone’s guess as to how many really understood why they were there.

These sorts of faddish expressions of support don’t really impress me. Not only do I not share the morally exhibitionist impulses of many in my generation (on all sides of the political spectrum), but I like fried chicken. So I carried on eating at Chick-Fil-A, annoyed by the lines of socially conservative culinary philistines who had no interest in experimenting with different sauce-sandwich combinations, but were just there to prove a point; annoyed by the hordes of self-righteous idiot undergraduates blocking the sauce station, eager to post photos of themselves being socially aware for their Facebook friends to see and then go home and find something else to pretend to care about. Just annoyed. And hungry.

Many of my more progressive law school classmates wanted to stop eating Chick-Fil-A. They wanted to show solidarity and help bleed dry the homophobic corporate monster. They wanted it so badly. But the biscuits are just too goddamn fluffy. The chicken is too goddamn juicy. So they ate. They ate with guilty relish. They drew straws to see who would drive and pick up sandwiches for everyone. They couldn’t quit Chick-Fil-A, no matter how repulsive its organizational gestalt.

What we have here, then, is something special. It’s not special because I ignored social currents out of a love for fried chicken. That expression of my metasociopathy will surprise nobody. What’s special is that we have here a chicken sandwich that made self-righteous law students mortgage their socially progressive principles. When a chicken sandwich overcomes the preening moral awareness of the most insufferably self-righteous subset of the population, that warrants attention.

Shanil and I went to Chick-Fil-A for his farewell lunch, a fitting tribute to his two weeks in the land of the free before his return to the freedomless tundra of Canada. We had to put the most controversial (and incidentally, the most popular) sandwich in America to the test.

The Place
Chick-Fil-A
1700 East Colorado Boulevard
Pasadena, CA 91106

The Order: Chicken Sandwich, Spicy Chicken Sandwich

The Price: $3.39 (Chicken Sandwich); $3.69 (Spicy Chicken Sandwich)

The Burgers
There really can be no controversy about one thing: these sandwiches are pretty delicious. Chick-Fil-A is quick to point out that they didn’t invent the chicken (God did that)…just the chicken sandwich. And they present the dish with the masterful simplicity of the inventor. There are no bells and whistles here. Each sandwich is cheeseless. On a sweet but too-thin white bun sits a thick chicken breast, breaded and fried to perfection, adorned only by a few meek pickle chips. The flavor profile is spare. Sauce is optional (I recommend the honey roasted BBQ). There is endless room to innovate: some add combinations of sauces. Others add a weblike layer of waffle fries. Still more are purists, allowing the sandwich to stand alone.

There is little to say here. The fried chicken is crisp on the outside, juicy on the inside. The standard chicken sandwich features flavorful breading, golden and summery. It crunches like deep fried sunshine, giving way to a perfectly prepared, succulent piece of chicken. The spicy version is similar, but with a sassy little kick on the front end. It’s got personality. It’s got spunk. The honey roasted BBQ, my sauce of choice, adds a creamy, mellowing sweetness that dovetails nicely with the pickles and complements the complexity of the chicken admirably. Sure, the composition lacks that inspired creative spark, and therefore there is little to balance. But it’s a delicious sandwich. No matter which version you order.

The unadorned beauty of these sandwiches are their primary virtue. They have the unprepared, untreated charm of Eliza Doolittle. But at the end of the day, Eliza Doolittle was still Audrey Hepburn. Who, you know, was a knockout. Another remarkable feature of these sandwiches, though, is the price point. At less than four dollars apiece, these are a serviceable alternative to In-N-Out if you aren’t in the mood for beef, but still don’t want to break the bank.

Don’t let the controversy surrounding Chick-Fil-A fool you. It had nothing to do with the food. And for the most part, it seems as though eating there is no longer a slap in the face of the gay rights movement. As a testament to that, Chick-Fil-A is thriving in West Hollywood, a city where a rainbow flag flies at city hall. So the controversy has passed. And the food is still delicious.

The Ratings
Chicken Sandwich
Flavor: 9.00 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.00 / 10.00
Value: 10.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 10.00 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 5.00 / 10.00
Bun: 7.70 / 10.00
Patty: 8.30 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.90 / 10.00
Toppings: 6.80 / 10.00
Balance: 7.90 / 10.00

Total: 82.60 / 100.00

Spicy Chicken Sandwich
Flavor: 9.00 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.00 / 10.00
Value: 10.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 10.00 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 5.50 / 10.00
Bun: 7.70 / 10.00
Patty: 8.70 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.90 / 10.00
Toppings: 6.80 / 10.00
Balance: 8.10 / 10.00

Total: 83.70 / 100.00