HiHo Cheeseburger

April 22, 2018 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place

HiHo Cheeseburger
1320 2nd Street, Suite B
Santa Monica, CA 90401

I know. It’s been a while. The last article I started to write for this Project was in October. I remember the exact day; it was immediately after Justin Turner did this. I tried to put my feelings into words that night, to no avail. I got swept up in the frenzy of October baseball. The hope. I fell in love with the possibility that 2017 might just be the Dodgers’ year.

Then this happened.

And then this happened.

And now this is happening.

And if that wasn’t enough, there’s this.

All of which has made me feel approximately like this.

Now, I’m not saying the serial and crushing failure of Dodger baseball and the casual, inevitable hopelessness of Kings hockey are the most pressing problems of our time. Surely neither is. But they sure can take it out of you. I guess my point is, it can be exhausting to love something. I’m not sure it explains my silence here. Maybe nothing can. Maybe an explanation isn’t necessary.

Whatever it was that took me away from this, though, one simple idea brought me back: life is too short not to seize the things that bring you joy and keep them close.

That was probably too heavy for a blog about cheeseburgers. But it was a couple weeks ago, spending a night at HiHo Cheeseburger with my better half (of whom I haven’t been seeing enough lately) that it hit me. It’s good to be with people you love doing things you love. So I’m back to say a few words about HiHo Cheeseburger. With a little good-natured pedantry on the front end.

The Order: Double HiHo Cheeseburger

The Price: $6.95

The Burger
I’ve eaten some great burgers in the past few months. I resolve to write about all of them in turn. But it took something like HiHo Cheeseburger to bring me back.

When you think and write about cheeseburgers, you’re often faced with dishes that are presented as elevated iterations of a classic form. Los Angeles as a food scene is obsessively colloquial. The culinary consciousness here is not, by and large, predisposed to traditionalist haute cuisine. Rather, it is about cultural reflection, comfort, familiarity. The food in this town is an expressive modality, a way for chefs to give you a window through which you can see who they are and where they come from, not merely what they can do.

It may sound a little high-brow, but it’s really the opposite. Food in Los Angeles is a way for chefs to connect with the rest of us. You’re not going to get a glimpse into a fancy culinary school; you’re meant to get a glimpse into someone’s childhood dining room. What makes food here truly exceptional (rather than just some cute nostalgic exercise) is that those classic dishes are re-imagined with beautiful, leveled-up ingredients.

To wit, all the patties at HiHo Cheeseburger are 100% grass-fed Wagyu beef from First Light collective–sustainably raised, totally free of all hormones, antibiotics, and GMOs. Laugh all you want at how cartoonishly L.A. that is; it tastes better. The beef elevates what fundamentally is an unabashed photocopy of a Double-Double (right down to the mustard grilling of the patties) to something memorable. The quality of the meat makes up for the slightly less-inspired seasoning on the patty.

Other elements of the Double-Double are referenced obliquely, for better and worse. The piquant onion jam admirably replaces the animal style minced onions and Thousand Island. The brioche bun is a step down from its sponge analogue, though it’s tough to take serious issue with it. The pickles, made in house, are exceptional: sweet, sharp, and snappy but also, delightfully, a hair thicker than you might expect, nicely rounding out the homage to the Baldwin Park O.G.

Regular readers will know I have no issue with people riffing on In-N-Out, especially if it’s done well. HiHo Cheeseburger riffs on In-N-Out quite well. And at $6.95, it’s an extremely high value proposition: you’ll have ample room in your wallet to give the Straus milkshakes or the banana cream pie a spin (and wash it down with a beer if you’re trying to drown your latest Los Angeles sports-induced sorrow).

HiHo doesn’t seek to elevate the concept of the cheeseburger. Just the execution. And in doing so, it embodies a lot of what is great about food in Los Angeles: it takes an iconic dish and pays respectful homage to it. If you’re like me, eating here will remind you of why you love living here. In spite of the Dodgers.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.80 / 10.00
Freshness: 9.50 / 10.00
Value: 10.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.00 / 10.00
Creativity / Style: 6.50 / 10.00
Bun: 8.90 / 10.00
Patty: 9.50 / 10.00
Toppings: 9.60 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.80 / 10.00
Balance: 9.70 / 10.00

Overall: 91.30 / 100.00

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

Errata: Cassell’s Hamburgers

April 30, 2017April 30, 2017 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

There is a line in Sophocles’ Antigone that has stuck with me. It is a scene in which Creon seeks Teiresias’ advice regarding whether or not to free Antigone. Teiresias tells the ruler, “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.” Now, I haven’t imprisoned my niece to reinforce gender roles or intemperately deployed the power of government in the context of familial conflict. Nor have I forsaken the bonds of marital and paternal love to preserve an imagined or preferred political order. But I like to think Teiresias’s advice is more generally applicable. Because, you know, parables. Right?

Anyway. As I’ve accrued some modicum of experience in my life, I’ve had occasion to look on my past with a more critical eye. By an large, I’m proud of the way I conducted myself. But there are exceptions. When one cannot or does not act to rectify past errors – to “repair the evil” – those exceptions have a way of blooming into regrets.

Having just hit a milestone, agewise, I think the time is right to come clean about an error I made early in this project. I went with Greg and Lemi to Koreatown’s Cassell’s Hamburgers, a bustling diner nestled in the first floor of the Hotel Normandie. I talked about how I didn’t feel as though Christian Page was reaching his potential with the burger he offered.

That review is, quite literally, the only one I look back on and regret. I like to think (perhaps self-indulgently) the evaluations presented on this Project range anywhere from eminently fair to downright authoritative. The Cassell’s review marks the lone occasion where I deviated from basing my judgment on the food on the plate. So, in the spirit of not committing the only crime, I went back to Cassell’s with Kelsey, Kristen, Nikhil, and Tracy. And now, I’m back before you with my proverbial hat in hand, to give Cassell’s the reconsideration it deserves.

The Burger
The chuck-brisket patty was even better than I remembered. Flavorful, tender, and rich, it burst with juicy personality, courtesy to that nearly 70 year-old crossfire broiler. The garnishes were as fresh as I remember. Everything was as it was on my prior visits. I won’t regurgitate here what I’ve written before. If you want to read it, follow the link above. Besides, it’s not really my sense of the burger’s quality that has changed, per se. There are a couple of things about that review, though, that bother me.

The first problem is that I docked the burger for not “hitting its potential.” In addition to being a maddeningly vague and subjective feeling that I struggled then (and struggle now) to justify, it’s just kind of irrelevant. There’s not a dish that’s been cooked that couldn’t be improved somehow. We can’t judge dishes (or anything, for that matter) on the basis of what it could have been. We have to look, first and last, a what a thing is. That matters more. And what Cassell’s is, is a delicious burger–one of the best in the city.

The second problem isn’t one I could have anticipated as I penned the review initially, but it’s a problem nonetheless. Cassell’s stacks up much more formidably than I expected against the other burgers I’ve had since. When people ask me what the best burgers in the city are, this one always comes to mind. That’s got to count for something.

I get it. It’s not like I’ve imprisoned one of my nieces. There has been no mortal sin committed here. It’s not as though I got drunk on power and perpetrated some monstrous act of megalomania. I just docked a burger a couple points unfairly. But a mistake is a mistake, and if this Project is to be worth relying on, you all have to know you can trust me to recognize my mistakes and correct them as they arise. The only crime is pride.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.60 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.50 / 10.00
Value: 9.10 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.40 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 7.50 / 10.00
Bun: 9.50 / 10.00
Patty: 9.70 / 10.00
Toppings: 9.50 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.00 / 10.00
Balance: 9.40 / 10.00

Total: 91.20 / 100.00

Sawyer

April 4, 2017April 30, 2017 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
Sawyer
3709 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90026

If you asked someone with little or no knowledge of Los Angeles to describe Sunday brunch here, she might paint a picture that looks a lot like Sawyer. Sunlight would stream through a constantly open window fronting Sunset Boulevard, filling the place with golden warmth. It would splash onto the face of the bright bar whose tiles evoke what you might find in the breezy colonnade of a Mediterranean – or maybe Aegean? – villa. To heighten the charm of it all, there would be a snug little patio out back, with a few tables, a fireplace, strings of unlit lights (“You should see them at dinner,” the host assures us).

That impossibly bright sunlight would bathe the crowd of diners, all trying very hard to look as if they weren’t trying hard. The men would sit, NIck Fouquet hats balanced on golden locks, henleys unbuttoned to there, draining Peroni from glasses that look too much like jars. Across from them would be ladies in vintage everything, wrists cocked, a glass of rosé balanced just so in their hands, nursing avocado toast with whisper thin discs of radish scattered atop. Everyone would be wearing sunglasses. Everyone would be beautiful.

The food would be typical Los Angeles brunch fare: the aforementioned ubiquitous avocado toast. Something with quinoa and kale. Mexican inspired items (here, shrimp tacos and a breakfast burrito). Chicken and waffles. A breakfast sandwich. And, of course, a burger.

Granted, this person might not know to paint Kelsey and me into her picture. Unless, I suppose, she envisioned Los Angeles as a place where wonderful girls like Kelsey voluntarily spend their birthday with burger-obsessed nerds. In which case, perhaps you’d find us painted into that idyllic scene right where we were today, at a corner table relishing the superlative people-watching Silver Lake generally (and Sawyer specifically) has on offer, and discussing whether Fear of God jeans would be worth the investment (the verdict: likely not), and contemplating the finer points of the Sawyer Burger.

The Order: Sawyer Burger (added bacon and avocado)

The Price: $18 ($14 base, optional additions (sunny side up egg, bacon, and/or avocado) $2 each)

The Burger
First, a quick overview of the presentation: between seeded rolls is a hefty patty, cooked medium (per our server’s recommendation) and thinly filmed with Grafton cheddar. The meat sits atop a single piece of lettuce about the size of a catalpa leaf. On top of the patty is a splash of tomato relish that looks like it came off the end of Jackson Pollock’s brush. The bacon and avocado were added last.

It’s the kind of burger you might expect from a restaurant focused on seafood. That’s not really a ringing endorsement off the bat, I realize, but for what it’s worth, it’s more a comment on the approach to this dish than it is one on its quality.

The patty is the burger’s greatest weakness. The seasoning was ham-fisted, unsophisticated, and excessive, creating a constant peppery undercurrent to every bite that was more annoying than charming (probably because of the lack of a subtle complementary flavor). The texture of the beef might perhaps best be characterized as “unsettling.” It’s hard to describe, but also decidedly…well, wrong. Whereas one might expect a beef patty to have a certain coarse crumble to it, Sawyer’s patty had an off-putting, sticky coherence to it. When cut, the patty looked – and tasted – downright raw in some places.

The cheddar may as well not have been there. Indeed, I almost forgot it had been included in the first instance as I ate it. It added no texture, no taste, no contrast, nothing. A true disappointment, especially considering the excellent Vermont cheese on offer. The lettuce was unwieldy and far too large, seemingly there more for artistic reasons than culinary ones. The bun was a soggy, tasteless mess, soaked before I even took a bite, and disintegrating like Lot’s wife once I laid hands on it.

The tomato relish was a theoretically interesting presentation, but based on the taste, I suspect that “relish” is being used more as an impressive label than a reflection of reality. It was pulverized tomato, a halfhearted, uninspired stew that merely impersonated a culinary flourish. In point of fact, the relish did nothing but soak the buns into oblivion, making the whole enterprise much messier than it needed to be. As even casual readers of this publication know (and yes, I’m indulging in the rank fiction that I may have another kind of reader), I’m not averse to getting my hands dirty, but it’s got to be in service of something.

Not to harp on it, but the relish really captures my sense that this burger was a seafood restaurant’s burger. Relishes, often work on fish as a means by which to complement the flaky, buttery flesh of the catch (as a trip to basically any hotel restaurant in Hawai’i would prove conclusively), but they’re less inherently at home on a burger. Burgers generally benefit from the presence of a true sauce. If you’re going to add a relish or a jam, fine, but it should have a purpose that comes across in every bite. This slurried, nascent pico de gallo did not achieve that.

This burger is not without positives. Like so many college electives, the bacon and avocado were the most pleasant aspects of this experience, largely because they were the least challenging. The former was thick and savory, cooked to a pleasant, succulent crisp. The wedges of avocado were rich and buttery, playing well – if predictably – with the bacon. But again, these garnishes stood largely alone. And it’s telling that the optional elements of the burger were its strongest elements.

Another issue is the sheer structure of this dish. It is so large, so unwieldy, that I never at any point got a bite with all the ingredients in it. In addition to being frustrating, it makes the burger an incoherent experiential jumble with no real arc. I daresay, $18 is quite a dear sum to fork over for such a burger like this, which is as poorly conceived as it is executed.

I’m not saying a seafood restaurant can’t make a good burger. I am sort of saying that you can’t approach a burger like you’d approach seafood, and just hope that you can let people throw some bacon and avocado on it and forgive all your sins. The team at Sawyer has created a burger in a Mahi Mahi fillet’s body. Idyllic atmosphere aside, this burger is a miss. Come for the ambience, maybe stay for the smoked trout salad? This is, after all, a seafood restaurant.

The Ratings
Flavor: 6.10 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 8.00 / 10.00
Value: 6.40 / 10.00
Efficiency: 6.90 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 8.10 / 10.00
Bun: 6.80 / 10.00
Patty: 5.10 / 10.00
Toppings: 7.90 / 10.00
Sauce: 6.00 / 10.00
Balance: 5.00 / 10.00

Total: 66.30 / 100.00

The Habit Burger Grill

March 5, 2017 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
The Habit Burger Grill
Various Locations

You may remember The Habit made waves a couple years back. Playing the role of dark horse to perfection, the Santa Barbara-based West Coast mainstay placed first in Consumer Reports’ fast-food survey, beating out other local heroes like In-N-Out (spoiler alert: that’s unvarnished sacrilege), and larger outlets like Steak ‘n Shake and Smashburger.

Now obviously, it’s far from clear that you, I, or anyone else should trust or defer to the culinary preferences of people who only got a say because they subscribe to Consumer Reports (like, consider how many people you know who subscribe to Consumer Reports). Having said that, the people surveyed ate almost 100,000 meals between them. So if nothing else, there’s a good amount of data behind this survey.

For a burger chain you’ve probably never heard of, the Habit is quite an old mainstay. It was founded in 1969, and has since steadily expanded throughout California, creeping into Arizona and Utah as well. It migrated east into New Jersey recently too, but it’s still definitely a child of the West. With thanks to Juno for making it possible, Bret and I took five from work to grab this old standard for lunch.

The Order: Double Charburger with Cheese

The Price: $4.95

The Burger
For such a well-established outfit, The Habit certainly has escaped widespread attention or acclaim. That might have something to do with its sort of silly branding (their truck invites you to “Get up in [their] grill” – see what they did there?), or the fact that it just sort of feels like a shoddy fast casual restaurant.

Far from the heaven-white, spit-shined gleam of an In-N-Out burger, the hidden gem illicitness of a Burgerlords, or even the ruddy and unvarnished appeal of the Oinkster, The Habit’s brick and mortar spots have all the charm of, like, a T.G.I. Friday’s. You’ll find them nestled in shopping blocks, flanked by, say, a Nordstrom Rack and HomeGoods. It’s almost impossible to take seriously, especially for a well-heeled foodie type. One expects servers with pique polos covered in buttons, fried onions fashioned into crisp flowers, seafood from oceans unknown, and steaks whose origin is impossible to discern.

At first blush, you might be struck by what feels like a too-expansive menu, replete with salads nobody ought ever order, an odd albacore sandwich that is just strange enough to intrigue (but not intriguing enough to order), and some curious sides (tempura green beans, anyone?). While it’s probably true that the menu would benefit from a good editorial trim, there is enough weirdness on this menu to suggest an undercurrent of sophisticated curiosity that might make this burger worth trying.

Readily, I will admit my anticipatory scorn was building heavily as I approached this burger. In a swell of self-congratulatory elitism, I prepared to dismiss the Consumer Reports survey result as just some sampling tomfoolery, reflecting the unsophisticated preferences of some culinary neophytes who lack the time, mind, or means to frequent the truly good restaurants.

Sadly, this is not (entirely) a redemption narrative. I was undoubtedly being unfair (and a big jerk) in my preconceptions about The Habit. That survey was, after all, just a survey about fast food. But in aid of crystalline clarity, let me state this unequivocally: this is not the best burger – fast food or otherwise – in this city, let alone the country. It is, however, a well (not perfectly) executed Californian classic, certainly much better than you might expect from the kitschy look of the place.

Envision a slightly heftier, meatier iteration of the (still comfortably superior) Double-Double with a worse bun, and you’re in the Habit’s airspace. The bun is a simple white bread bun with the lightest kiss of sweetness. It was slightly dry but adsorbent enough to keep things from getting messy. The lettuce was shredded, flirting with the mayonnaise and the pickles hidden below, creating a piquant and crisp cushion to anchor the whole flavor profile of the burger. The tomato wasn’t exactly market-fresh, but gave a juicy enough punch. The caramelized onions were a nice touch, sweet and sharp on the tongue without being too soupy (though they were a bit stringy and hard to eat).

The Habit distinguishes itself – for better or worse – in the size of the patties. They are massive crisped discs of beef, with slabs of melted cheese draped over them like fire blankets. They are big enough to decisively take center stage in the flavor profile of this burger without completely drowning out the other ingredients. True to the burger’s name, they have a solid char, which gives a distant savory bitterness to the front-end of every bite. Sadly, they’re also a bit overcooked, which dries them out a fair amount. What the patties bring to the table in flavor, then, is sort of ruined by their textural deficiencies. And given their sheer size, these faults are tough to ignore, and aren’t really balanced by the burger’s other virtues.

Having said all that, I can understand why the Habit would have gotten itself something of a following. It’s an undeniably excellent deal at the price point – value-wise, it definitely falls in the same category as In-N-Out. And it probably deserves to be slotted in with that class of burgers that are “slightly better than fast food” but “not really gourmet.” And it handily beat out my elitist preconceptions. But you should quickly disabuse yourself of the notion that the Habit can lay a finger to In-N-Out. I have mulled over that result for a good long time, and have come no closer to a colorable explanation for it. But the fact remains that while I may never understand how the Habit beats out In-N-Out in the minds of the Consumer Reports readership, it isn’t difficult to understand the restaurant’s appeal. It may be overblown, but it isn’t undeserved.

The Ratings:
Flavor: 8.40 / 10.00
Freshness / Quality: 8.00 / 10.00
Value: 9.70 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.70 / 10.00
Creativity / Style: 7.50 / 10.00
Bun: 7.90 / 10.00
Patty: 7.90 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.00 / 10.00
Sauce: 7.50 / 10.00
Balance: 8.40 / 10.00

Total: 83.00 / 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

The York

October 18, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
The York
5018 York Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90042
It feels like October has been all about the Chicago Cubs and their date with destiny. They’re the latest beneficiary (see also 2004 Red Sox, 2010 Giants, 1998 Jay-Z) of the special treatment we give to baseball teams that are awful for long enough. After over a century of losing, the Cubs – finally – are good. And like the Red Sox, the Giants, and Jay-Z before them, the entire nation (but for we select few who don’t share the impulse for alacritous bandwagoneering) will love them until they finally win. Then we’ll revile them for doing the very thing we hoped they’d do all along. To be a “lovable loser,” you have to keep losing.

I watched the final innings of Game 1 of the National League Championship Series at The York, which was a Highland Park mainstay long before Highland Park was cool. It’s a vaulting industrial space, where Edison bulbs throw barely enough light on roughly erased chalkboards sporting the menu of the day, and onto the carmine bricks behind. The one television is located inconveniently at the back end of the bar, obscured by something from almost any angle. It was there that I watched Adrián González smack a game-tying single, and then shortly thereafter, Miguel Montero be spoon-fed a hanging slider with the bases loaded.

Much like the Cubs, the York has established itself as a good-natured neighborhood standard. And much like the Cubs, it’s kind of hard to see what all the fuss is about. Besides the cool (but imitable) vibe, the cocktails are weak, the food is fine, and the staff just mostly competent. The clientele is a weird mashup of young fathers and old bachelors, thirty-somethings all. It’s as if the York is the last place where those two demographics can meet and remember times not too many years ago, when their lives looked more alike.

Kristen, Tristan, Peter, Shahin, Kelsey and I took a trip to the York for dinner to catch the end of the baseball game before going to Creep LA, which – spoiler alert – was basically me paying $53.50 to be called “daddy” by an emo kid in lingerie and then locked in a closet the size of a moving box (with two other people, one of whom, blessedly, was Kelsey) by a small man in yoga pants.

The Order: Cheddar Burger, medium rare

The Price: $15

The Burger
The York’s burger is served on Bread Bar brioche, a heavily marbled sirloin and chuck hybrid patty, rocket (which, more or less, is hipster for “arugula,” which, more or less, is douchebag for “bitter spinach”), harissa aioli (harissa being a North/West-African chili paste that you may have run into at Moun-Of-Tunis, Koutoubia, or a similar spot), and pickled onion. And cheddar, obviously.

Just by reading that list of ingredients, you may have the impression that there’s a lot – potentially too much – going on here. That was my concern going in, too. Imagine my surprise, then, when the burger actually wound up being strangely tame on the palette. There was no pinching bitterness from the flaccid arugula, no astringent sourness from the too-soupy onions, no blunted bite from the aioli. Everything got mixed together, reduced into some tasteless primordial ooze, the culinary equivalent of Cage’s 4’33”. And to top it all off, there wasn’t even the buttery, eggy, cloudlike sweetness you would expect from the brioche (though this had more to do with the fact that it tasted a day old than any fault of poor Bread Bar’s) it was crumbly and Gobi-dry.

And that’s a shame, considering the patty was quite well-conceived. Heavily marbled and a well-executed medium rare (evenly rouge-hued and barely bloody), the flavor was rich, the texture hardy and coarse. It was crisped on the outside, but retained its juiciness exceptionally well. Just like Charlize Theron in The Devil’s Advocate, it deserved a better supporting cast (instead, we got Shouty Al and dead-eyes Keanu; I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a metaphor or not).

Were I predisposed to being snarky, I’d say the good news is that the burger York was only the third-most unpleasant thing that happened to me that night. But since I am miles above snark and the solicitation of cheap laughs, I’ll leave it at this: Notwithstanding all the neighborhood affection, all the history, all the prescient neo-industrial decor, the York’s burger left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe not quite as bitter and caustic as Miguel Montero left, not quite as parched and salty as being locked in that closet, but the fact that those three things are part of the same conversation probably tells you all you need to know.

The Ratings
Flavor: 7.20 / 10.00
Freshness / Quality: 8.10 / 10.00
Value: 6.90 / 10.00
Efficiency: 7.00 / 10.00
Creativity / Style: 8.50 / 10.00
Bun: 4.80 / 10.00
Patty: 9.40 / 10.00
Toppings: 7.60 / 10.00
Sauce: 7.30 / 10.00
Balance: 7.00 / 10.00

Total: 73.80 / 100.00

Original Tommy’s

August 2, 2015August 3, 2015 ~ prachandrasoma ~ 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Blue Streak was on television. I was twelve when that movie came out, and I loved that shit. I saw it in the theater twice. I bought it on DVD and watched it until I could talk along with every scene. I remember how hard I laughed when Martin Lawrence got really sassy with FBI agents, how hilariously awkward Luke Wilson is, how cramp-inducingly funny it was when Dave Chapelle showed a bunch of drug dealers how he “pulled somebody’s guts out through their ass, and their eyes fell out.” So came on, I was thrilled. Here was a movie that I loved when I was a kid. I figured it had held up as well as all the other movies I loved around that time: Tommy Boy, Happy Gilmore, and Billy Madison, just to name a few.

But it hasn’t. At all. It really is a hopelessly unfunny movie. It’s dated. It’s trite. It’s badly written. It’s disgracefully acted. The plot is an absolute throwaway. And while I’m not prepared to completely freak out about it, the lesson is clear: Sometimes, the things you love just don’t hold up.

Yesterday, Shanil and I went to Tommy’s for lunch. This was a place I always loved as a kid. I think you can kind of see where I’m going with this.

The Place
Original Tommy’s
2575 Beverly Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90057

The Order: Double cheeseburger (no tomato), fries, large Coke

The Price: $7.95

The Burger
In 1946, Tommy Koufax opened up this shack at the corner of Beverly and Rampart. It didn’t (and doesn’t) look like much, but it’s since grown into a little Los Angeles empire. It’s older than In-N-Out, and more exclusively a Los Angeles institution. More than 50 million people have enjoyed Tommy’s signature chili-drenched burgers in the seven decades since Tommy’s first opened its doors.

I remember, as a kid, piling into the car with my brothers and parents and driving out to Tommy’s. We’d return home with a big box full of cheeseburgers, chili-cheese fries, icy sodas, and sweet-hot yellow peppers (when they didn’t forget to give them to us, which they usually did). Looking back, it was one of my favorite family traditions (besides Disneyland, which is my runaway favorite). I don’t remember much from those drives, but I never will forget the excitement, the eager and expectant relish with which I unwrapped those burgers. Tommy’s was among my favorite youthful indulgences.

Admittedly, I haven’t been to this place in quite some time. My brothers and I grew up (you’ll notice I did not say we “matured”). They have lives and families of their own now. They’re making new traditions, which is super cool. But as I pulled into the drive-thru at Tommy’s yesterday, I couldn’t help flashing back to those days, and I got absolutely demolished by a wave of sentimentality. When I unwrapped my burger, I was suffused with those old, familiar childlike expectations, back before I was the cynical, narcissistic malcontent with a shitty personality and a cloudy disposition.

Then I unwrapped it. And I was like, “Wait, I used to look forward to this?”

It’s really not appetizing to look at. The burger itself is two waifish, overcooked patties blanketed in cheddar, which is itself slathered with a pasty, semi-solid block of chili that’s really more the consistency of refried beans. It’s rounded out by ebullient diced raw white onions, snappy pickles, and some good old-fashioned yellow mustard. All of this is wedged between buns as limp and lifeless as an unusually lazy sloth. Who is asleep. And drunk.

Let’s talk about that chili first. It’s not how I remember. You’re not talking about chili that’s going to drip everywhere, spilling off the burger in that tantalizing way that it does when the sexy ladies on the Carl’s Jr. commercials take their seductively greedy bites. No, this is something closer to a brick of chili. It looks solid, and has the consistency of a paste. It tastes convincing (and good) enough, but there’s an unreality about it – a kind of textural creepiness – that’s a little off-putting. If I want astronaut food, I’ll ask my friend Courtney to get me some of that freeze-dried ice cream shit (explanation: Courtney works for NASA; though in all honesty, she’d probably tell me to stop talking crazy and get some real food, albeit preferably without the side of catastrophically annoying Asian kids).

But anyway.

While the chili is the centerpiece of the burger, it’s the other toppings that really surprise, and end up making a stronger statement to this burger’s credit. The onions are as sharp and sweet as a honey-dipped knife. The pickles are firm and sour, with that satisfying snap. These toppings provide good textural and flavor contrast. And frankly, it’s nice to see someone outside of a baseball stadium still has love for yellow mustard. I like yellow mustard, dammit. In this age of favoring gruyere over cheddar, of making complex and fancy-ass umami alloys of different types of beef, of conflating “classic” and “boring,” I find this steadfast adherence to tradition (which almost certainly is the product of laziness and a lack of creativity rather than any kind of worthy sentiment) refreshing. And it’s good, in an unabashedly sophomoric kind of way.

So here’s the point: young Pra’s unbridled love for Tommy’s was not justified. Old Pra is sager in this regard (though admittedly, Old Pra misdirects his affection in other ways – see, e.g., my latest ex-girlfriend…*shiver*). Old Pra recognizes that the chili isn’t very good. The beef is not good. This burger just isn’t as good as I remember it being. I started wondering, “Shit, was I as wrong about Tommy’s as I was about Blue Streak?” My happy childhood memories were threatening to crumble around me.

But then I got my shit together and thought about it a little more. Unlike Blue Streak, I wasn’t totally wrong about Tommy’s. This burger doesn’t suck. The garnishes add charm and surprising complexity. The chili isn’t earth-shattering, but then again, a) it’s still chili, and b) it’s a little unrealistic to expect Mike Stevens-level shit on a burger that costs eight bucks (with fries and a drink). The beef isn’t good either, but there’s enough going on to obfuscate that fact and make the overall experience pretty damn worthwhile – the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, and all that. So I guess this burger actually is less like Blue Streak and more like Disneyland. Sure, it’s less majestic and awe-inspiring than it was when I was a kid, but that’s not going to stop me from going. Because it’s still pretty damn good.

The Ratings:
Flavor: 8.50 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 7.80 / 10.00
Value: 9.80 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.10 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 8.20 / 10.00
Bun: 7.00 / 10.00
Patty: 6.50 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.90 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.00 / 10.00
Balance: 8.80 / 10.00

Total: 82.60 / 100.00

The Los Angeles Burger Project

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