Meatzilla!

May 14, 2017May 14, 2017 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
Meatzilla!
646 South Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90014

Dip your toe into the internet musings about Meatzilla, and you likely will find yourself annoyed. The exclamatory nomenclature. The burger with a pepperoni pizza bun. The unshakable feeling that everything about the place was conceived with a smirk. Indeed, even without the deviant punctuation, the name itself is really an etude in hipster snark. There’s very little in the reportage about this place that would inspire any reasonable person to take it seriously.

Most of this stuff had escaped me when DJ, a partner in my office, told me he had it on good authority that Meatzilla made the best burger in Downtown Los Angeles. Now, having waxed adoring on a different downtown burger myself, I felt predictably compelled to investigate. So I headed over to Meatzilla with Bret and Greg. It’s a shack on Main Street, a pretty barebones affair, with a cramped kitchen, a whiteboard menu, stacks of soda boxes filling a side doorway, and a playlist like a Tarantino soundtrack. If they’re trying to project the image of hustling newcomers just trying to make it, it’s coming off gangbusters. Think Steinbeck repurposed for the Snapchat generation. Okay, that might be overstating the point a bit, but you get the idea.

The Order: Beef! Beef!

The Price: $9.50

The Burger
The whole concept of the place may seem tongue-in-cheek and affected, but the fare on offer is far from it. While there are some experimental items on the menu to be sure, Meatzilla is conceptually a purist’s burger joint, whose bread and butter is no-frills, beef-forward presentations redolent more of summer cookout than a hipster Thanksgiving.

The Beef! Beef!, for instance, features two absolutely mammoth patties with discs of housemade pickles about the diameter of a nickel laid sporadically on top, along with tangy white onion. A thick primordial ooze of cheese – Muenster on one patty and American on the other – drips from the meat. You might mistake it for a runny fried egg (which you can add, by the way, for a buck fifty). A generous – but not excessive – helping of Sriracha ketchup films both buns. And that’s it. No lettuce, no tomato, none of the other standard garnishes.

The beef is flavorful and surprisingly not overwhelming. It was a hair overcooked, and while that normally wouldn’t be an issue, when there’s this much beef, there’s a smaller margin for error. The pickles were utterly exceptional though, perfectly sour and with a healthy snap to them. The onions were similarly well integrated, soaked in ketchup, and smartly kept raw to add more crunch and tang to complement the massive amounts of beef. The ketchup was not overpowering, offering a nice sweet-hot undertone to each bite without being too assertive. The cheese was a coup: gooey, rich, and indulgent, it gave every bite a sumptuous, smooth warmth.

All these garnishes, though, were just complementary though. While Burgerlords and In-N-Out seek to harmonize all the ingredients into a coherent, synthesized whole in which all the components cooperate to create something larger than the sum of its parts, Meatzilla is, true to its name, a beef-first and beef-last kind of enterprise. If, at Burgerlords, the burger is an orchestra in which the meat is just one instrument, at Meatzilla, the beef is the soloist, with other instruments there to add color and texture, but never to command your attention.

So is this the best burger in Los Angeles? I guess that depends. This burger is not a work of art. But I left my meal with a pretty clear understanding of why someone might fall in love with it. If you think a burger should be an unapologetically beef-focused dish, Meatzilla will appeal to you. They’re about beef. Not about buns (though the bun holds up impressively here, even if it isn’t the most dynamic component of the burger), or garnishes, or balance, or anything else. But beef.

What’s more, there’s a sentimentality inherent in this dish. Meatzilla has the sort of unbalanced charm that will take you back to the backyard cookouts with friends you only distantly remember from a washed-out photograph. The smell of the grill would waft over and intermix with the harsh scent of chlorinated water. It’s the burger you ate before you cared that soda was bad for you. It’s the burger you ate before you started obsessing over calorie counts and carbohydrates. It’s the burger that would buckle a paper plate. It’s the burger you ate before you became a well-heeled culinary connoisseur and forgot how to enjoy something unsophisticated. It’s the burger you ate when you cared more that your food was fun rather than an immaculately curated art project, when it didn’t matter if a dish wasn’t a perfectly manicured harmony of flavors and textures.

The last word is that while it’s hard for me to say this is downtown’s best burger, it’s hard to argue it isn’t either. It’s a strange, unsettled feeling I left with, but it’s a feeling that is pulling me back to Meatzilla for another visit. Which, at bottom, is all that matters, I guess.

The Ratings
Flavor: 8.60 / 10.00
Freshness / Quality: 8.80 / 10.00
Value: 9.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.50 / 10.00
Creativity / Style: 7.50 / 10.00
Bun: 8.00 / 10.00
Patty: 8.70 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.70 / 10.00
Sauce: 7.90 / 10.00
Balance: 7.90 / 10.00

Total: 84.60 / 100.00

Haché

October 31, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
Haché (pronounced ah-shay)
3319 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Depending on your affinity for the classics, you may have heard about Desert Trip, a music festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio (home also to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival). Unlike conventional festivals, Desert Trip offered a lean lineup of classic rock luminaries: The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters, and The Who. No industry neophytes here to soundtrack day-drinking; this was a headliners-only affair.

Almost immediately, this festival drew the derision of sneering millennials, likely still coming down from a tour in the Sahara Tent at Coachella (you know, artistically discerning social critics like these). They called Desert Trip “Oldchella,” an incisive, hyper-literate critique of the low-energy sort who enjoys music festivals that feature musical instruments instead of computers vomiting out spleen-rupturing bass.

It’s tempting to conclude that there is a youthful condescension among our generation toward anything we regard as a relic of the past, a sort of reflexive regard for modernity, a respect based on nothing but the fact that a thing emerged from the sea of narcissistic home recorders and YouTube amateurs to seize some measure of notoriety. That view maximizes convenience, but we often fail to see its fundamental flaws, fail to recognize that not all good things go viral, and not all things that go viral are good.

I have neither the time nor mind to attempt to unpack what animates this elevation of new over old, but I’m no less convinced that it exists. I also wonder if that’s the reason people feel the need to present Haché as something that it isn’t. See, if you are inclined to poke around Google prior to going to Haché, you might be misled. Internet commentators have woven a web of half-truths about this place, for whatever reason. It’s not a dive; it’s rustic, they say. It’s a French-inspired and bistroesque, they say. They serve steak sandwiches, they say. Don’t call them burgers, they say.

You’ll note, once you arrive and have ordered, that the above statements range from “pretty” to “categorically” wrong. It is a dive. There is nearly nothing in the cramped patio and sticky high-tops that is redolent of the breezy bistro you might have imagined. The mesh window at which you order,and the t-shirt clad hipster that brings you your burger don’t evoke a Parisian bistro where sighing poets scribble elegies as much as a Bostonian Irish pub where townies punch out graduate students.

By the looks of it, this is a place you’ve been a hundred times before. This is your dad’s dive bar. There is no real attempt at novelty here. This is Desert Trip, not the Sahara Tent. It is more Steve Miller than Steve Aoki. You get the point. Regardless, Haché has been on my radar for a while. Finally after much cajoling – guilting? – from my dear friend Greg, I met him, Bret and Alex there to try a burger. Or a haché. Or a steak sandwich. Or whatever you might want to call it.

The Order: Karma Burger

The Price: $5.95

The Burger
Whatever Haché isn’t, it is, in many ways, essentially Silver Lake. There is a winsome haggardness to the place. You walk in feeling as though you have stumbled into the middle of a carefully structured, meticulously curated collapse. A middle-aged man in a quarter-zip fleece sits near the corner, his beer barely dented, half-heartedly watching the Seahawks lose. A young man with an undercut checks his phone compulsively, casting the occasional furtive glance doorward to see if whoever is meeting him has arrived yet.

The thought might occur to you that this is the least affected crowd that has ever gathered on Sunset Boulevard. And sure, that may have something to do with the fact that it’s a rainy Sunday in Los Angeles, but it felt appropriate for this place. There’s an agelessly genuine quality to Haché. It’s not a place out of time, it’s a place without a time. That may not make sense, but it’s as clearly as I can state it.

Of course, you don’t come to Haché for the atmosphere (at least, I don’t know why you would, with both Café Stella and Winsome a stone’s throw away). You come for the hachés. They are billed as French-style steak sandwiches. Haché, of course, doesn’t call them steak sandwiches. Depending on what part of the menu your eye darts to first, you’ll see them called hachés or burgers. In point of fact, they’re burgers with patties made of ground sirloin steak.

That ground Angus sirloin patty is swathed in a weblike loose-weave blanket of American cheese and topped a leaf or two of bracing lettuce, a couple discs of vermillion tomato, translucent halos of red onion, and a thin glaze of Karma sauce, which tastes like a mashup of Thousand Islands and harissa-spiked mayonnaise on a hearty, earthy cracked wheat bun.

While the sirloin patty is often framed as something new and different, it really is more an attempt to elevate a classical form. It renders the patty less greasy, more inherently flavorful, cleaner than its brisket or chuck cousins. It is noticeably fresh, albeit a shade overcooked. The seasoning – on the outside of the patty only – cannot fully compensate for the fact that the patty is too well-done. Since the meat on the inside of the patty remains unseasoned, once you’ve broken through the outer crust, there isn’t much beneath it in the way of flavor.

The other garnishes are fresh, well-proportioned, subtle. The onions, though raw, are not too sharp, offering a gentle pinpricking sting. The lettuce is parchment-delicate, not crisp, not wilted and chewy. The tomato is bright and succulent, a burst of freshness to wash over the finish of each bite. And the sauce has a whisper of heat amid the creamy cool of the stuff, leaving a lingering suggestion of slow spice.

This burger is a nod to the classics. It is different, but it’s not revolutionary. Not forced. It’s organic, tried and true. Some might think that is something for which to apologize. They might try and frame this to highlight some gimmick that might capture your attention. They might try and make this sound like something it’s not just to make it sound fresh. They might be tempted to swap out the resplendent Telecaster for a Korg. They should resist that temptation. Drum machines have no soul.

The Ratings
Flavor: 8.70 / 10.00
Freshness / Quality: 9.20 / 10.00
Value: 10.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.00 / 10.00
Creativity / Style: 7.00 / 10.00
Bun: 8.10 / 10.00
Patty: 8.50 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.00 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.20 / 10.00
Balance: 8.60 / 10.00

Total: 85.30 / 100.00

Shake Shack

September 12, 2016September 12, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
Shake Shack
8520 Santa Monica Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069

If you never caught the new (like, that new new) Star Wars movie, then you missed out on Kylo Ren, the most angst-addled villain to grace the silver screen in quite some time (you may know him better as the darkest-skinned – but still white, of course – person on Girls). See, Kylo Ren is angsty because he wants very badly to be compared favorably to Darth Vader. He wants to be the next Darth Vader. So he acts and talks the part. He commands with unforgiving brutality. He wears the mask that changes his voice, even though he doesn’t need it. Think of his relationship with Darth Vader as being kind of like Rivers Cuomo’s relationship with Buddy Holly.

And much like Cuomo, he just isn’t quite as special as his idol. Deep, withering suspicions – that he’s ultimately just a pale imitation of the thing he strives to be – roil in him. They consume him. And most of all, they make him hate the character in the film who he recognizes as truly special, truly significant. She achieves everything he’s worked so hard for, and she doesn’t even have to try.

It’s a common trope in our world and our folklore: the figure who longs to be a feature of history, but really is just a footnote. These are people with lofty aspirations to emulate and evoke truly monumental figures, but ultimately, they are undone by their inability to recognize that the mere imitation of an act or a sound may not – and probably will not – capture the subtleties and complexities that exist beneath it. What I mean is, Kylo Ren choking a person out as part of his WWDVD? mentality is quite different from what animated Darth Vader – namely, living at the nexus between guilt and doubt and rage.

Similarly, putting together a burger that features some of the same ingredients as those featured on the best chain burger money can buy doesn’t guarantee that you’ll best In-N-Out. And so, in a swaggering and expansive outpost on Santa Monica Boulevard, Shake Shack joins the ranks of these reductive imitators, clamoring for attention and plaudits, begging for favorable comparisons to a great institution.

Shake Shack is the latest in a long line of burger chains that demand to be compared to In-N-Out. It is a chain that builds buzz via sophomoric articles like this. Never mind that the two are in no way comparable. The one is an international chain with an expansive menu (including three different burgers, seasonal/weekly/monthly/whateverly flavors of ice cream, bespoke craft beer, Abita root beer on tap, Cold Stone Creamery style concretes), the other is willfully limited. The one is surprisingly expensive, the other almost guilt-inducingly cheap.

But the comparison is being made. So if you drive by Shake Shack, you will see crowds of impossibly cool West Hollywood types: New York imports with trendy haircuts; t-shirts featuring a sneering slogan or maybe a reference they only almost understand; shadowed and lined eyes drooping under the weight of their contempt for the world, smiling with half their face as they post a link from a blog about an article they haven’t read about a study they haven’t read but which reinforces the fact that everyone who disagrees with their particular opinion on their particular cause celebre du jour (based on exhaustive review of numerous blog posts like this) is ill-informed and probably malicious.

These are people bound together by fibrous, almost extant strands of supercilious energy, people who are fueled not by the Krebs cycle like the rest of us, but by the knowledge of their superiority. And even for these walking superlatives, the need to know if Shake Shack really is better than In-N-Out is so pressing, so dire, that it can wrest them from the urgent business of being better than you.

I went with my parents and Kelsey. Because while I may not be cool, I am the purveyor of a publication about burgers in Los Angeles, so I’m drawn to trendy burger spots like a fly to a turd.

The Order: Shack Burger

The Price: $5.29 (not including fries or drink)

The Burger
Roughly speaking, I think there are two types of people who might argue that Shake Shack is better than In-N-Out: the first are the reflexively contrarian naysayers. These are people who don’t have particularly strong or well-developed feelings about In-N-Out (or any alternative), but dislike its ubiquitous appeal and enjoy the idea that their opinion is challenging and controversial. Then there are people who need New York to be better at everything (rather than just better at being bigger and smellier). I’ve talked about this phenomenon at some length before.

The goal of this piece, though, is not to take up the issue with either group. In point of fact, I prefer not to entertain the comparison at all. As I mentioned before, these restaurants are different enough that the comparison itself is more than a little spurious. Shake Shack is a peri-industrial hipster chic millennial iteration of a soda fountain, whereas In-N-Out begins and ends as a burger stand out of time, a relic of its founding age. Another reason behind my rejection of a comparative discussion – and I smirk as I type this – is that these two products are not in the same league.

Shake Shack’s offering features an oversalted, overcooked patty, watery tomato, heat-wilted lettuce, and insipid Thousand Island (Shack sauce) between two feeble, infirm, too-doughy potato buns (this actually surprised me, because I remembered the buns being much better when I first tried Shake Shack in Washington, D.C.). The entire presentation is a pittance, a burger so small it barely qualifies as a burger. You will not savor every bite, and after you finish, you will wonder why you waited in line for so long with all those impossibly self-obsessed trendchasers and paid more than double the cost of a Double-Double for it.

If in Shake Shack you were hoping to find The Chirping Crickets, you’ll have to settle for Raditude. If you were hoping for Luke’s father, you’ll have to settle for Leia’s emo brat. Shake Shack talks the talk. It’s high on swagger and hype, but it’s little more than a well-appointed disappointment. This restaurant doesn’t deliver a product worth mentioning in the same sentence as In-N-Out, let alone comparing to it.

The Ratings
Flavor: 7.40 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 8.90 / 10.00
Value: 7.60 / 10.00
Efficiency: 6.90 / 10.o0
Creativity/Style: 7.50 / 10.00
Bun: 4.90 / 10.00
Patty: 7.20 / 10.00
Toppings: 6.50 / 10.00
Sauce: 6.50 / 10.00
Balance: 7.00 / 10.00

Total: 70.40 / 100.00

Winsome

August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
Winsome
1115 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Winsome is not on Sunset Boulevard. Head west down Sunset (away from Downtown) and as you pass Beaudry, you’ll see the Holy Community Church on your right. Beyond that, you’ll see a new apartment building made of white stone and glass. Just past the church, make a right on to White Knoll Drive. That’s where Winsome is, in the ground floor of the aforementioned stone and glass building. Just a public service announcement, lest you wind up wandering aimless and befuddled down Sunset like Kelsey, Erin, and I did (that is, until finally we gave up and called the restaurant to whimper a desperate request for directions).

I couldn’t help but wonder why they say they’re on Sunset if the restaurant demonstrably is not on Sunset? Well, this is Los Angeles, which means it’s all about appearances. It’s easier to brand yourself as a trendy new Los Angeles eatery if you’ve got an address on an iconic Los Angeles thoroughfare. Per contra, it’s much harder to do it when you front some tributary with a name that sounds like a sleepy cul-de-sac. And if people get confused or lost by this branding chicanery, all the better; being impossible to find in spite being on a major street is another mark of effortless cool.

Make no mistake, though. This place is far more polished than Echo Park, a neighborhood renowned more for its unvarnished charm than for its sparkling new real estate developments. It’s beautiful for being the situs of a cultural collision of sorts, where numerous ethnic and socioeconomic groups live side by side. There’s something aspirational about that Echo Park.

Winsome represents the “new” (or, if you prefer, the “approaching”) Echo Park. The building that houses it resembles one of those swanky new high rises over by L.A. Live. It’s the kind of building that one suspects will be ubiquitous in a few years’ time. It’s the kind of building that multiplies and slowly, inexorably drains the charm right out of a place, until all that’s left is a spiritually vacant enclave occupied by the seemingly inexhaustible supply of incalculably basic USC alumni. It’s a nice enough building in itself, but as more of them crop up, before long, Echo Park will be a place where you only see soul if it’s immediately followed by the word “cycle.”

Right, anyway; the restaurant.

Winsome has developed a fair amount of buzz as a brunch-and-pastry spot. Its light-wood, airy interior has the body of a diner but the heart of a case study house. The long, dining room is flanked along one edge by a long, white oak bar and on the other by booths with windows for walls. This breezy, midcentury space spills out onto an idyllic patio, on which strings of lights hang languidly above. This charming outdoor area is loosely packed with amateur food photographers trying to no-filter their way to fame.

But it still bears markers of the old Echo Park. Our laconic waiter was clad all in black but for old white Reeboks and an apron the color of pond scum (the latter of which was splattered inexplicably with persimmon-hued paint). He oozed edgy and aloof Echo Park cool, and he did his job without all the fanfare of interpersonal warmth.

Atmosphere aside, the place is renowned for its brunch offerings. The pastries are local celebrities and, in the aggregate, merit the acclaim they receive (the strawberry-vanilla brioche is especially superb). The caramelized grapefruit is a novel idea, but largely ham-fisted in execution. The slathering of honey provides a syrupy front end to the flavor profile, yielding a product that tastes like Taylor Swift’s personality: saccharine on the surface, but ultimately and fundamentally marred by a gothic – almost corporate, definitely innate – bitterness.

There is a burger on the menu, but no one really talks about it. I went with Kelsey and Erin to find out if they ought to talk about it.

The Order: The Burger

The Price: $16

The Burger
There’s a scene in The Fountainhead where Ellsworth Toohey says to Howard Roark, “Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.” Roark replies, “But I don’t think of you.” That exchange flitted into my head as I tried to collect my thoughts in preparation for writing this; I just didn’t have that many thoughts to collect.

On the face of it, there’s nothing objectionable about this burger, and one might even think there is the potential for something quite good. The bun is a seeded pan de mie sourced from Gjusta. A bun from a different bakery is an odd choice for a restaurant that prides itself on its superlative baked goods, but I suppose Gjusta is an estimable choice if you’ve chosen to outsource your bun-making. Delicately sweet and soft at its heart with perfectly toasted edges, this bun was the highlight of the burger. The patty is about a third of a pound of grass-fed Sunfed Ranch beef, with a slice of milky white Hook’s aged cheddar melted on top. It is rounded out by pickled shallots (allegedly) and a tall, tangled stack of mustard frills.

The server recommended I order the patty cooked medium. That was an error; it was overcooked, dry, and charmless. The patty scarcely deserved the exceptional cheese that was melted on top of it, a truly lovely Hook’s aged white. It was distantly sweet, mild, perfectly melted, and utterly wasted by the lifeless piece of flesh it was meant to complement.

With a better cast around it, this cheese would have been a wonderful final touch. But even ignoring the patty, the rest of the burger is rather a mess. The mustard greens were flaccid, virally overabundant, and bland. The pickled shallots so nearly approached absolute zero on the palate that I actually doubted their existence. The sauces, served on the side, were ketchup (from a bottle) and an almost oppressively banal aioli, which essentially tasted like mayonnaise that had been left sitting out. They weren’t much, but they were just about all I tasted every time I took a bite.

I rarely make overt mention of price unless it is a virtue. In this case, though this is far from an offensive product, it does not even nearly approach being worth $16. This price tag is wholly unjustifiable. I couldn’t help feeling I was paying for the delicious inattention of our server and the string of patio lights more than I was paying for a good meal. I very seldom feel as though I have wasted money eating a burger. This was one such occasion.

This is a burger without personality; it is a lazily conceived pro forma offering that expresses nothing, demands nothing, gives nothing. It smacks of brunch menu tokenism (which is a thing I made up just now, but essentially amounts to the creative minds behind this restaurant saying something like, “Ugh, we probably should put more lunch items on this menu, because otherwise it’ll be all ‘br’ and no ‘unch.'”).

Is this the folly of a young restaurant? Probably not. Most young restaurants err by trying too hard. This just feels lazy. There’s something respectable in a calculated, but ultimately botched, gamble. There is little to respect – let alone consider or discuss – in paint-by-numbers concepts executed poorly.

So try as I might, it’s hard to articulate exactly what I think of it. I just don’t think of it. Nor should you.

The Ratings:
Flavor: 6.10 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 8.80 / 10.00
Value: 4.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.80 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 6.20 / 10.00
Bun: 9.10 / 10.00
Patty: 6.90 / 10.00
Toppings: 6.40 / 10.00
Sauce: 4.80 / 10.00
Balance: 6.30 / 10.00

Total: 67.40 / 100.00

Fritzi

August 23, 2016August 26, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ 1 Comment

The Place
Fritzi
814 Traction Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90013

I remember when Give Up by the Postal Service came out. I was a sophomore in high school. It was before winter formal. That particular winter formal was to be a rare triumph for me in the romance department. I took one of the prettiest and most popular girls in the freshman class. Unfortunately, as it turned out 1) I wasn’t very attractive (please indulge my optimistic use of the past tense), 2) she was out of my league, 3) I’m inveterately and painfully awkward, and 4) teenagers are a heartless sort.

The result: she bolted as soon as we arrived, and spent the entire evening with confident, attractive junior alpha males who played sports and got bad grades. Meanwhile, I, the archetypal beta male, sat on a bench staring into a swimming pool, waiting for high school to end, and playing various tracks from Give Up in my head to pass the time. This admittedly depressing scene was interrupted when I was rescued by my friend David and his date Sara (incidentally, about halfway through “Clark Gable”).

I still wonder why that album came into my head, especially considering my tortured relationship with it. I hated to like Give Up. See, some Death Cab for Cutie fans were nervous when Give Up dropped (these were the Sub Pop days, when Death Cab fans were less numerous and more proprietary than today’s breed). Publicly, we worried side projects portend artistic restlessness, or worse, stagnation, that they threaten to reveal a beloved artist reduced to repackaging old ideas instead of presenting new ones.

Privately though, we’d admit that our real issue wasn’t artistic; it was that side projects have the whiff of infidelity. Death Cab fans liked to envision Ben Gibbard poring over ragged spiral notebooks scribbling the lyrics to the next “A Lack Of Color,” not seeking new modes of expression. Him having another band felt like a betrayal.

What an odd feeling. It’s not as if I didn’t love Ben Gibbard just because Give Up came out. It’s just that the release of Give Up made me face all facets of that love, even the ugly ones: affection, loyalty, fear (of change and of loss), comfort, complacency, possessiveness, jealousy. The only thing more frightening than watching someone you love change is the prospect of getting left behind somewhere along the way. So I listened, with layered trepidation.

I find these feelings have survived in me, and they resurfaced again recently when Neal Fraser diverted his attention from Redbird to give Fritzi the full sit-down restaurant treatment. When Fritzi became something more than a whimsical pop-up or a window at Arts District Brewing, that familiar proprietary jealousy, that envious dogma of mine, was impossible to escape, even though culinary side projects often work out just fine.

The Order: Fritzi Burger

The Price: $11.50

The Burger
Maybe you’ve never heard of Fritzi. It would be hard to fault you, actually. It first surfaced as a pop-up, then soft-opened as a practically nameless take-out window nestled in a corner of Arts District Brewing, where everyone from the merely buzzed to the blacked out could partake in some high-class, high-carb hangover prophylaxis. The only signage to speak of was a large marquee above the window that glowingly admonished all passers-by: “DON’T FORGET TO EAT.”

By the time Fritzi actually opened a dining room directly next door to Arts District Brewing (serviced by the same kitchen as the take-out window; the two spaces are less adjacent than they are interlocked), it would have been easy to not notice. There was almost no fanfare; besides, we’d been eating off that menu for months.

But Fritzi commands attention. It is the brainchild of Neal Fraser, who ranks among the most deadly serious chefs in the city. The fare is fast-food inspired and fundamentally uncomplicated.With quintessentially Arts District pretentiousness (i.e., trying far too hard to project a laid-back, industrial Bohemian charm), Fritzi will tell you they serve “artisanal nosh.” That means no of-the-moment crudo, no robust and hearty braised goat gemelli, and – sadly – no peri-eponymous (I can’t resist making the epunymous joke) tray of veal.

Nothing here is a signature dish. This is an off-duty project, a glimpse at what Neal Fraser might make at a cookout – nothing too high-minded…but, well, he’s still Neal Fraser. As such, expect sophisticated, subtly reimagined classics.

The Fritzi Burger is, for lack of a better term, so Fraser. Each component of the conventional burger is rethought, elevated. This burger offers a hybrid patty (Nueske bacon and beef) that is given ample (viz., nine hours) sous vide time; a generous smear of Fontina fondue which offers a gooey, honeyed nuttiness; a sweet Calabrese relish with a whisperingly slow-hot finish; a fresh salve of mild thousand island; and iceberg lettuce to add cooling textural contrast.

The patty is a masterstroke, a subtle, intensely flavorful execution of an idea that sounds excellent in theory but often is butchered grotesquely in practice. The Nueske bacon imparts a smoky, marbled dimension to the beef, evoking the faintest thoughts of a Texan barbecue pit. The fondue creates a sumptuous, almost silken coating around the patty, mild and comforting. Both sauces are excellent, and work well enough in concert with one another. They offer a few redundant notes, but ultimately elevate the entire experience. I was glad for the lettuce, if only because it offered a bit of complexity in a burger that otherwise verges on textural monotony.

While Fraser excels in reimagining individual ingredients, he sometimes almost loses sight of the forest for the trees. It’s fine to reshape each piece of a puzzle, especially if you improve each one; but change them enough, and they won’t fit together.

In the case of the Fritzi Burger, that’s just a distant threat – this burger hangs together well, never veering into incoherence. But it also is a mildly unsettling dish, because – as a whole – it doesn’t always feel completely intentional. But existential niggling aside, this burger is stellar, not to be missed, and yet another shining example in a litany of Neal Fraser’s innovative genius.

Ultimately, no matter how rabid a Death Cab fan I was, I listened to Give Up. I couldn’t help myself. In my more honest moments, I recognize it as a superior product to solidly (maybe conservatively) 85% of Death Cab for Cutie’s oeuvre. But even short of that admission, I know I put aside my feelings of betrayal on behalf of Gibbard’s bandmates because I wanted to understand what was compelling enough to divert his creative focus. I didn’t really listen because I wanted to. I listened because I had to.

So if you felt similar vicarious betrayal when Chef Fraser took time away from Redbird to launch Fritzi, you probably also feel a similar morbid curiosity regarding what Fritzi is all about. Succumb to it. This burger may not be better than 85% of the menu at Redbird, but it is too good to be missed owing to proprietary hipster envy.

The Ratings:
Flavor: 9.60 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 10.00 / 10.00
Value: 9.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.40 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 10.00 / 10.00
Bun: 8.40 / 10.00
Patty: 10.00 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.10 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.70 / 10.00
Balance: 8.90 / 10.00

Total: 91.10 / 100.00

Petit Trois

August 16, 2016August 16, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ 4 Comments

The Place
Petit Trois
718 North Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038

I was talking to my friend Peter last week about Petit Trois. He went there with his wife recently, and ordered the omelette. I’m not sure Peter is an omelette connoisseur, but he certainly is an educated enthusiast. Anyway after a few bites of their omelette – a facially pedestrian offering with nothing more Boursin (yes, from the box) pepper cheese and a dusting of chives – his wife asked if it was the best omelette he’s ever had. “No,” he replied, “it’s the first omelette I’ve ever had.”

That’s what makes Ludo Lefebvre special. His strength is not so much in wildly innovative concepts (though one trip to Trois Mec will show you he’s no slouch in that regard), but rather in expression. Whatever the concept, from veal belly with crispy artichoke on down to a double cheeseburger, Lefebvre cannot be matched in execution. Each dish is prepared with such skill and care, that his food has the potential to transcend quality and establish itself in your mind as an archetype of what a certain dish should be like.

Ludo Lefebvre is the rare chef who can make a simple dish feel definitional. Not every dish achieves it, but when one does, you feel it, and to describe it is really just to speak normatively about how every dish of that kind ought to taste. I’ll stop short of saying that his best offerings are infused with the intent of the divine, but the thought occurred to me.

The Order: Big Mec

The Price: $18

The Burger
Even if the name Petit Trois isn’t immediately familiar to you, you likely know more about it than you realize. It’s the daughter restaurant of Trois Mec, at which reservations are famously difficult to secure, but which offers among the finest tasting menus in the city. Petit Trois, then is an approximately Le Comptoir-sized appendage to its venerable – albeit only marginally larger – parent. Though the restaurants have markedly different personalities, they share more than a wall; they have a common creative nucleus: Ludo Lefebvre teams with Los Angeles culinary power pair Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo (the minds behind Animal, Son of a Gun, and Jon & Vinny’s) on these two gems tucked away in a strip mall behind a gas station. Don’t let the understated location fool you, though – this part of mid-city is a culinary hotspot. Just across the street is the mighty, higher-profile Mozzaplex, where Nancy Silverton et. al. have been slinging really important food for decades.

Roughly speaking, Petit Trois is a French lunch counter. Reservations are not accepted, and the menu is a cheesy, framed and laminated piece of printer paper. They serve comfort food which oozes with nostalgic sentimentality (for instance, every Sunday, Ludo Lefebvre – continuing a family tradition – does a chicken roast, where a half chicken is offered atop mirepoix, a bed of rough-cut vegetables redolent of a French country table). The dishes are, in concept, often childishly simple. Confit-fried chicken with bitter-cool frisée. The aforementioned omelette has a flavor profile simple enough not to overwhelm my five year-old niece, but a subtle, buttery complexity that would floor just about anyone.

The cheeseburger is similar. The name is a tip of the cap to an iconic – though hardly estimable – progenitor, and the inspiration, weirdly enough, is discernible. The Big Mec is a double cheeseburger featuring two patties, Tillamook cheddar, all utterly drenched in Russian mayonnaise and house-made bordelaise sauce jammed between two brioche buns. This burger is a study in messy decadence. It bleeds sauce over its edges like a fountain. The bottom bun is coated with the two sauces but somehow not soggy, and incredibly, never even threatens disintegration.

The concept here is to unify simplicity and excess. At first blush, that might seem paradoxical, but it works in practice. This burger is decadent without being overwrought. It takes simple ideas and presents them in a maximalist fashion. It is the culinary equivalent of “Untitled,” the first song off Interpol’s debut, Turn On the Bright Lights. In that song, Paul Banks repeatedly intones the promissory phrase, “I will surprise you sometime, I’ll come around,” amid a swirling, sparkling, ever-rising torrent of Stratocaster. There isn’t much to it; but it’s arresting because the same idea, the same brief, haunting, beautiful motif, is pounded into your head so many times. That approach informs this dish as well. Of course, the concept would be nothing without execution. The Big Mec is executed masterfully.

The cheese is perfectly melted but still decidedly solid – it has heft and mass. And it’s Tillamook, so it’s approachable: sharp and flavorful without being too overpowering. The patties are stellar, massive things. Charred on the outside, pink on the inside, irrepressibly juicy and thick. They absorb only some of the ocean of sauce, but it’s enough to subtly change the flavor of the meat.

At bottom, this burger is about the sauces. And really, it’s about the bordelaise. The Russian mayonnaise is piquant, fresh, and just creamy enough, but it is utterly overshadowed by its companion. The bordelaise at Petit Trois is made with red wine and veal stock and mounted with foie gras (usually, the mount is butter). It is astounding. It teeters on the boundary between boozy and acidic, like wine a few atoms away from oxidation. But it is given shape, depth, and balance by the foie gras mount. In the end, everything about it feels decadently intentional. It is the most challenging, but also the most comforting, bordelaise you’ll likely ever taste. It is smooth but also sharp, mellow but also bright. It is also just about omnipresent in this burger…and you’ll still want more. It also creates a beautiful, natural mash-up with the Russian mayonnaise – so natural, in fact, that the sauces feel more coextensive than cooperative.

You’ll ravenously devour this plate of food. Your hands and teeth will drip with oxblood bordelaise and Russian mayonnaise the color of cooked salmon. You will do violence to this burger. The taste of the sauces will linger in your mouth long after you finish. You will be exhausted, you will be panting. You will look down at the plate, full to the gills, and you will ache for more. You’ll see the pool of what’s left of the two sauces, intermixed, looking like a Woolnaugh endpaper, and you’ll wish it wasn’t over.

This is a cheeseburger. Other things we previously might have known as cheeseburgers do not deserve the privilege of sharing a categorical identity with this dish. It is the archetypal burger: comforting, rich, indulgent, decadent, massive, messy, meaty, subtle, warming, unpretentious but refined, accessible, filling, and utterly delicious.

Make no mistake: This is as indispensable an eating experience as the critically acclaimed tasting menu across the wall. If you have not yet eaten this cheeseburger, it may well be argued that you have never eaten a cheeseburger at all. The Big Mec at Petit Trois is nothing short of a masterpiece. Drive quickly, order quickly, but eat slowly. After all, this will be your first cheeseburger – you should savor it.

The Ratings
Flavor: 10.00 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 10.00 / 10.00
Value: 8.40 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.80 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 8.90 / 10.00
Bun: 9.90 / 10.00
Patty: 10.00 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.70 / 10.00
Sauce: 10.00 / 10.00
Balance: 10.00 / 10.00

Total: 95.70 / 100.00

Sunny Spot

August 4, 2016August 4, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The 405 freeway is maybe best described as a piece of hell that Los Angeles chose to annex in 1964. It (along with bananas-high taxes) is the price we pay for living in a sun-soaked paradise: a throbbing vein of gridlock, on which – at the best of hours – brake lights pulse rhythmically. Quite often though, it’s worse, and the string of red lights in front of you looks like a fluorescent snake if you squint.

For those who live in Los Angeles, the 405 is a conversation piece. When I meet friends for a meal in Santa Monica or Venice, inevitably I will describe to them either a) what a tragedy the 405 is today, or b) how I skillfully, creatively managed to circumvent the 405. These topics are staples of the conversational diet in this town. And they make us an easy target.

I recently spent a Saturday morning – and part of the afternoon – on the 405, driving to brunch at Sunny Spot. My interminable journey through the gridlock (which, in familiarly epic largesse, spilled indulgently back onto the 101) found me listening to Loveless on repeat and texting my friend Bret with my car in park (and just to completely embody the stereotype, I’ll share that I was between Getty Center and Sunset – nightmare).

Unless you live on the west side, you’ll have to endure some version of this drive to get to Sunny Spot. When you arrive, you’ll find a classically Venice exercise: peeling turquoise paint on which the name of the restaurant boldly is emblazoned in coral-colored cursive (think the colors of the key at the San Antonio Spurs’ arena circa 2000), a meticulously curated shabby-chic beachside dive aesthetic. It tries hard not to try hard.

You’ll likely have lost your reservation by the time you arrive (assuming you had the foresight and misplaced optimism to make one). So you’ll have to wait among aspirant screenwriters and armchair critics; almost impressively basic young women with protein powder-dusted boyfriends following close behind; post-surf stoners, desperately hungry and wondering why they hath forsaken Taco Bell.

It goes without saying that a tiny proportion of guests will be talking to one another. After all, to our generation, a meal with friends merely means sitting at a table with other people who are also glued to their Instagram feed. True to form, you’ll see the patrons of the restaurant being alone together, side-by-side but absorbed in Pokémon Go or composing sarcastic YouTube comments or adding this “memory” to their Snapchat story or whatever the intimacy-killer du jour is.

You’ll try and push this depressing portrait of collaborative loneliness out of your head. You’ll get a greyhound from one of the surprisingly attentive bartenders (you won’t get a Bloody Mary, because they aren’t fantastic here, and you won’t get a mimosa because mimosas are sort of silly). You’ll steep in the charming, faux-rustic atmosphere of the place, the loose and warm summer shade. If you’re the type, you’ll lovingly muss your hair and frame a selfie or two. You’ll wait longer than you should for a table, and do your best not to wonder if it would be easier to get a table at Providence than here. Then you’ll remember that you should relax; it’s the weekend, and the weekend was made for wasting time.

The Order: Double Cheeseburger

The Price: $15

The Burger
The reason I bring up the 405 and the whole look of Sunny Spot is because I have to talk about them to talk about this burger.

The 405 is not just a freeway. Well, on the surface it is. It’s a few lanes arranged in a predetermined path, peppered by ramps every few miles. But dig deeper, think harder, and you might be surprised with what you realize. The 405 forces us to confront the ironic truth that, to get somewhere, we have to accept going nowhere for a while. It wrenches us from the stupefying, swipe-right torrent of instant and meaningless gratification that occupies so much of our time and thought. It pulls us away from the relentlessly interconnected world and makes us confront our own thoughts. It demands the one thing so many in this generation lack: patience.

My point is that the 405 isn’t what it seems on the surface, and if you think about it in the right way, you can understand how sitting in traffic actually is a blessing, an opportunity for growth and reflection that has become vanishingly rare as our world becomes a giant touchscreen. At the very least, it can show you that often times, there’s more to things than what you might see from a cursory look.

Sunny Spot is sort of like the 405 in that way. If you weren’t looking all that hard, you’d see a beachy Venice restaurant with a gregarious color scheme. You might miss the subtleties at play here. Their brunch menu features standard items with haute tweaks. Grana Padano in an otherwise unremarkable chop salad. Crisp chicharron on the Cuban pork sandwich. A sunny egg on the BLTA.

This is a place that quite clearly is trying to give you what you want in a way that’s better than you wanted. They want to blend the familiar with the high-level. It’s not just a beachside shack; it’s a place that is dedicated to the marked – if incremental – heightening of tastes. This is admirable, and an especially tall order when your target audience is so often obsessed with the banal and unchallenging.

What I’m trying to get at here is the (weird, semantic) distinction between being complicated and being complex. The 405 is complicated because it introduces logistical uncertainty in my life. Because there are so many damn cars on it, I’m late for any plans that involve me taking the 405. But the 405 is complex because it makes me feel something every time I’m on it, and exploring those feelings makes me think more deeply and more critically about the world around me and my interaction with it.

Sunny Spot itself is uncomplicated – it’s a simple enough formula of beautiful, precisely disheveled people and a milieu to match; but it’s complex because it seems to be at least attempting to subvert and refine the unsophisticated impulses of the very clientele to which the place – at least aesthetically – caters by subtly altering the familiar.

How does this distinction apply to burgers? Well, it’s easy to make a burger complicated by fettering it with a slew of features. But complexity isn’t about the number of variables in play; it’s about the depth of interaction between those variables, and it’s really about the way the thing makes you feel, what it arouses in you when you take a bite. Sunny Spot rejects being complicated in hopes that it might achieve subtle complexity.

In eschewing all the traditional trappings, Sunny Spot is trying to challenge your preconceptions of what is indispensable on a burger. Lettuce, tomato, ketchup: these are distractions. Sunny Spot presents a burger with a spare flavor profile. By reducing the number of ingredients, the goal seems to be to heighten subtle interactions rather than presenting an amalgam of various flavors.

This burger places two hefty patties smeared with American cheese front and center. This centerpiece is rounded out with dijonnaise, pickles, and caramelized onions, all of which is sandwiched between two brioche buns. Note that this hits every one of the basic taste triggers: sour (pickles), sweet (dijonnaise and onions), bitter (onions), salty (beef), and umami (beef and cheese). This burger touches all the bases without giving too much of anything.

The good news is that this burger is efficiently conceived and executed. It’s a competent exercise in lean construction. But that’s all it is: just craft. This burger clearly wants the diner to do the work of figuring out how these flavors are put together. That doesn’t stop it from being good. But it precludes greatness.

A great burger will give you a window into the mind of the person who made it. It might even arouse memories, feelings, thoughts. It will show you something or make you feel something. The best food isn’t that which you can appreciate as a well-formed study in culinary craft. It’s the food that enriches you somehow, connects with you individually, feels like it was made for you. This burger will mean the same thing to everyone who eats it. Few will abhor it, none will yearn for it once it’s gone. It’s a pleasant, but eminently duplicable, experience. As far as it goes, it’s great. The problem is that it just doesn’t go all that far.

In this case, the distinction between complicated and complex is purely academic. This burger is neither. Relatively few ingredients interact in predictable, uninspired ways. The beef and cheese overwhelm the flavor profile. The brioche is a touch dry. The dijonnaise and pickles are barely perceptible, so any subtle interaction between them is a whisper in a thunderstorm. The onions are unevenly distributed on the patty, providing pockets of soupy bittersweetness. None of this is offensive – in fact, the toppings themselves (especially the dijonnaise, oddly enough) are all quite good – but the ingredients simply stand side by side without ever cohering. This is an orchestra tuning, not playing a symphony: the talent may be there, but the real show hasn’t started yet.

This burger was not made for you. It was made for everyone. It is always correct but never remarkable. It will be good to everyone and great to no one. Fairly, you may not care about the fine-grain distinctions between complicated and complex. In that case, know this: you will neither regret ordering this burger nor crave it again. But it won’t make you feel anything. And it certainly won’t make you forget that drive.

The Ratings
Flavor: 8.20 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.20 / 10.00
Value: 7.10 / 10.00
Efficiency: 5.20 / 10.00
Creatvity/Style: 7.80 / 10.00
Bun: 7.80 / 10.00
Patty: 8.90 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.70 / 10.00
Sauce: 9.00 / 10.00
Balance: 7.30 / 10.00

Total: 79.20 / 100.00

Redbird

June 12, 2016June 12, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

I think about judgment day a lot. Call it the end of the world, or the apocalypse, or whatever you want. I think about it. I think about when fire and brimstone rain down heavy and hot from skies that split like the seam of a too-small blazer. When it turns out the Old Testament was right. When God gets sick of all our shit and exacts vengeance on us for our innumerable sins. When we all find out that we were fools to be cynical and supercilious. When the joke, as it happens, was on us all along. When it doesn’t matter whether we’ve found God, because he finds us. When it doesn’t matter what we believe. When nothing matters but the lives we’ve led.

When that day of reckoning comes, I hope I’m sitting at Redbird with the tar-black summer sky above me, a meal settling, the cold sting of a scotch and sherry cocktail lingering on my lips, waiting for my pavlova to arrive. That’s not because Redbird is the best restaurant in this city, or even the fanciest. It’s not because Neal Fraser is the best chef in the city (though he must be in any conversation on the topic). But I can’t think of a better place to face the apocalypse (leaving aside the delicious irony of being condemned to an eternity alongside Dante’s most wanted while sitting in a repurposed rectory).

See, when it all ends, I want to be somewhere beautiful, and I want to be doing something delightful. Redbird is the most beautiful place to eat in Los Angeles. Bar none. It also is one of the ten best restaurants in this city. Its décor is as eclectic as its menu, which in turn is as eclectic as Los Angeles. Fraser presents crudo with bright wedges of citrus and an adobe-red dusting of peppery togarashi; delicate, crisped slabs of Wyoming trout; a symphonic barbecued tofu (which, by the way, is dream-hauntingly good – better even than Sang Yoon’s resplendent chicory-coffee barbecue sauce-bathed Kurobuta pork ribs at Lukshon – whether or not you like tofu). And he presents them all with such easy familiarity that you’ll forget how weird it is to find them all on the same menu. Just like Los Angeles, in which so many different cultures and kinds live side by side. It’s curated chaos, but to those of us who have been fortunate enough to really come to know it, its splendor is difficult to match. The perfect place to watch it all end.

Wednesday was not the apocalypse, so Bret and I settled for lunch at Redbird. It’s a perfect option for those who ache for a longer intermissio from the raw grind of the work day. Fraser offers a slightly abbreviated version of his menu, including a prix fixe for the indecisive and slightly profligate, and a burger for … well, not least for the man who writes about burgers.

The Order: Prime Burger

The Price: $18

The Burger
This might be the burger for the end times. See, if you happen to be jonesing for a burger when the fabric of the earth falls away and reveals the roiling inferno that lies behind it all, you won’t have time to let the marrow melt, or caramelize the onions, or pull any other high-cuisine moves. You’ll have time to throw together a few ingredients – whatever is at hand – into the last burger you’ll ever eat. Now, having said that, it’s the last burger you’ll ever eat. And you’ll be damned if you’ll let it be pedestrian. Even at the end of the world, you’ll have to compromise, to balance countervailing interests.

The Prime Burger at Redbird manages that. It is spartan in an indulgent kind of way, deceptively complex, intensely flavorful but stripped of pretense and unnecessary ornamentation. This feels like the burger chefs will make when there is no one left to cook for. If Howard Roark spent his life behind a grill instead of a drafting table, he would have aspired to create this burger. It is the product of passion and craft. Every ingredient serves a purpose. Nothing is out of place. The fact that it’s a crowd-pleaser? That’s merely an externality.

The patty is pure Fraser: massive, marbled, loosely packed, pink and bloody. It might be overwhelming, I guess, were it executed with anything less than perfect mastery. But this is Neal Fraser, so it’s executed with nothing less than perfect mastery. The remoulade is piquant, tart, and generously portioned (and why not? You’ll want an extra scoop of sauce when the apocalypse is impending). This sauce is a beautiful, rich, indulgent complement to the sumptuous, almost buttery, beef. Aged cheddar drips like sap, so slowly that it forms an amorphous tendon that seems to connect patty to plate. It’s creamy and thick, with a distant whispering sharpness. There is a chile relish that adds a smoky sweetness (but almost no heat), and extra pickles to add more zip if you want them.

The bun is the burger’s weakest part. A too-dry, too-thick brioche, it tasted a day old and was a bit too imposing for this burger. The dryness of the thing wasn’t helped by the fact that it was flaked with sea salt. It’s a noticeable imperfection, but the rest of the flavors are bold enough to compensate for it. In the end, the burger hangs together impressively well in spite of a disappointing bun. Besides, when judgment day comes, you probably won’t be too picky about the bun on your burger.

In case it isn’t abundantly clear, I liked this burger very much. It’s big and brash, but is ultimately memorable for its relative simplicity. It’s a really well-prepared, thoughtful offering. It manages to achieve simultaneously simplicity and complexity, boldness and subtlety, immediacy and depth. It’s a great burger. Don’t wait until the end of the world to try it.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.30 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 10.00 / 10.00
Value: 7.90 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.70 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 8.30 / 10.00
Bun: 6.80 / 10.00
Patty: 10.00 / 10.00
Toppings: 9.00 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.90 / 10.00
Balance: 9.30 / 10.00

Total: 88.20 / 100.00

ERB

January 17, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ 1 Comment

The Place
Everson Royce Bar (ERB)
1936 7th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90021

I knew Everson Royce as a liquor store in Pasadena with a pretty good selection of whiskey and (apparently) a considerably better selection of wine. Today, it’s grown up into one of the trendiest bars in one of the trendiest neighborhoods (mine, incidentally – NBD but KBD) in Los Angeles. The façade is spartan: bare neon lights, buzzing, form the word “BAR” in white capitals. To the right of the threshold, a simple goal plaque bears the name of the bar and the year of its establishment — 2015.

Mozzaplex alumnus Matt Molina is the mind behind ERB’s menu. After a weirdly sudden (but evidently, not acrimonious) departure from the Mozza empire, Molina came here, to a scaled down bar-restaurant concept that is much less in the “high cuisine” category. From a tasteful mid-city icon with a voluminous wine list to a buzzing hipster hive with a menu section dedicated to boilermakers? Welcome to L.A.

Anyway, this burger has earned some pretty considerable hype. Nikhil, Bret, Shawn, and I went to give it a try.

The Order: Single Burger

The Price: $10

The Burger
Molina keeps it simple. The bun is buttered brioche. The patty is prime beef chuck overrun by decadent, soupy Tillamook that is something in between a topping and a sauce. There’s a thin film of a bright garlic aioli under the patty. It’s accompanied by a few wedges of dill pickle. All of the ingredients are expertly assembled and beautifully complementary. Operating at the curious nexus of minimalism and decadence, this burger is a surprising and satisfying offering.

The sweetness of the just-browned bun finishes with round notes of toasted butter that sidle up against the milky, sharp cheese before melting into the hardy, uncomplicated savor of the chuck. The aioli peeks out intermittently, not intrusive, but allowing it’s presence to be felt, and adding a subtle spark of creamy sharpness.

This might come as a surprise, but I won’t complain about the lack of toppings. There’s enough complexity in play here to keep your palate occupied from bite to bite. But when you offer a barebones presentation like this, it’s important not to cut corners on quality. Molina’s burger sidesteps the skimping issues that make Eggslut‘s burger a frustrating endeavor. The patty here is substantial enough to satisfy. The problem is in meat quality. For such a meat-centric offering, Molina asks a lot out of straight chuck. A more subtle – and yeah, maybe more indulgent – patty construction would have gone a long way towards making this burger something really special. You know, that or a few orders off the boilermaker menu.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.60 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 8.80 / 10.00
Value: 8.70 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.10 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 8.00 / 10.00
Bun: 9.70 / 10.00
Patty: 7.80 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.50 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.60 / 10.00
Balance: 9.30 / 10.00

Total: 88.10 / 100.00

Burgerlords

January 5, 2016January 6, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ 6 Comments

The Place
Burgerlords
943 North Broadway, #102
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Los Angeles is beautiful because no matter how well you know her, she keeps changing on you in subtle, unknowable ways. Just when I think I’ve got her figured out, I stop and look in time to see the sun hit her in a slightly different way. The only constant in my relationship with this town is that I love it. The reasons why I love it, though, like me, are always changing.

I could go into a big long thing about it, but that’s kind of what love is, isn’t it? Watching someone change – and changing yourself – but staying connected? Because eventually you learn to think of change not as the disappearance of the old, but the discovery of something new. And that’s how, after years and decades of marriage, people wake up together just as fiercely in love as they were on the morning after their wedding.

Or something. Gracious, don’t take my word for it; I know way more about burgers than love.

Here’s my point. My favorite thing about this project is that, no matter how exhaustively I research, no matter how much I think I know, there’s always a surprise just around the corner. A comment made in passing by an acquaintance. An almost-hidden spot that makes me double take (and maybe almost rear-end someone) driving down Broadway. A recommendation from someone I’d written off as a dilettante. A remark from someone who’s just trying to revive a conversation.

Two weeks ago, I didn’t know Burgerlords existed, even though it’s practically in my back yard. Now, I’m sitting here with the empty box in front of me, the wrapping still soggy with thousand islands, the fast fading smell of the best french fries I’ve ever eaten and a truly remarkable burger lingering like a cloud above my coffee table, writing about it. God, I love this city.

Here’s all you need to know by way of background: Burgerlords is the brainchild of the actual children of Andre Guerrero, who you know because he’s the guy behind the Oinkster. It used to be the name of an insanely popular Tumblr run by the same dudes. Now, it’s a restaurant hidden in a corner of Chinatown where it would never occur to you to head for food. Which is unfortunate for you. That’s why you read this, though.

The Order: Double Cheeseburger Combo

The Price: $10.00

The Burger
I’ll spare you the suspense. I know I haven’t eaten every burger in Los Angeles. But none of the ones I have eaten can beat this one. I won’t belabor that point too much. Instead, I’ll get to brass tacks.

This burger is quite obviously an homage to the Double-Double. And yes, living up to that progenitor is an audacious goal.

Obviously, this is a much smaller operation than In-N-Out. The Guerrero brothers have not proven that they can maintain quality in the face of expansion. But they have expressed no intention or ambition to expand. For now, Burgerlords is just a window in Chinatown that you can’t see from the street. When you go – and you must go – resist the temptation to try and see the future through that window. Instead, try and appreciate what’s in front of you. The burger being made with love, care, and respect. The sizzle and hiss of beef on burner. The crackle of frying potatoes. Focus on what’s there. It’s more than enough.

The patties are grass-fed beef. They call it their “tri-blend” without further elaboration. None is necessary. It has the hardiness of chuck, the sweet tenderness of short rib, and insinuates (without achieving, but come on, the thing is ten bucks) the complexity of Wagyu. It’s seasoned to utter perfection, with the seasoning bringing out the natural savor of the meat, amplifying rather than masking.

The bun is the most overt tip of the cap to In-N-Out. It matches its ancestor in spongy sweetness, and is the perfect bookend to this burger. The toppings are the weakest point; the lettuce is a little sad and wilted, the tomatoes are a bit watery. These are minor nits. The onions and cheese fare better, offering a personality and tastefully assertive flavor to contrast the anchoring umami undertones of the patty. The thousand island is the subtlest you’ll likely taste on a burger, but is the perfect, cooling counterpart to the beef and cheese.

As I read over the last couple paragraphs, which I’ve written and re-written, they don’t get the point across. It occurs to me now that there really is no getting the point across. These ingredients coalesce into something much more than the aggregation of their individual tastes. Just like a symphony is more than a bunch of instruments being played at the same time. There’s nothing special about this burger. But that’s what makes it so special.

There’s a line in 500 Days of Summer where one of the characters describes the girl of his dreams, and enumerates the many ways in which she is different from his girlfriend. Then he pauses, and says, “But Robin is better than the girl of my dreams – she’s real.”

I thought of that line while I was eating this burger. I could dream up an insane burger. One with foie gras, a bone marrow drip, St. Andre cheese, avocado, bacon, or any other number of exotic or indulgent ingredients. But dreams are dreams; they don’t necessarily reflect anything that would work in the waking world. Burgerlords hasn’t made the burger of my dreams. They’ve done something better. They’ve made what is to date the best burger I’ve ever had.

Burgerlords might not be good enough to make you fall in love with Los Angeles. It might not make you fall in love with burgers. (Although, if you didn’t love either of those two things, it’s not clear why you’re here reading this in the first instance.) But for those of us who already love either or both of those things, it’s a pretty damn good reminder of why.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.80 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.60 / 10.00
Value: 9.80 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.80 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 7.00 / 10.00
Bun: 9.60 / 10.00
Patty: 9.60 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.60 / 10.00
Sauce: 9.40 / 10.00
Balance: 10.00 / 10.00

Total: 93.20 / 100.00