Umami Burger x Impossible Foods

May 21, 2018May 21, 2018 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
Umami Burger
738 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013

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If you work in a reasonably woke corporate environment (or a not-at-all woke corporate environment doing its best imitation of a woke corporate environment), you’ve probably heard something about implicit social cognition (it’s more commonly referred to as unconscious bias, but I actually prefer the former term. Anyway). According to UCSF, these are extra-conscious formed perceptions about groups of people that “stem from one’s tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing.”

I admit that this idea is probably most usefully deployed to explain human interactions, but actually, I don’t think it’s cabined to our views about people. I think these kinds of categorizations apply to our feelings about everything–like food. It’s why your one friend inexplicably avoids okra in spite of having never eaten it. Or why your significant other refuses to countenance egg white in his cocktails. Or why your sister refuses to try the red velvet from that vegan bakery. Or why your cousin won’t eat at Gracias Madre.

We all have our biases, built over decades, brick by seemingly-unrelated brick. The sum total of our experiences is a flawed whole, a view of the world through a lens that’s necessarily cracked. Or convex. Or smudged. Or something. Point is, the very act of being an individual means operating with incomplete information. Even absent malice, the manner in which we examine the world is informed by our inevitable lack of information. Or our inevitably incomplete or skewed perspective. It’s what our venerable former Secretary of Defense termed the “Unknown Unknowns.”

This, I suppose, is why I wouldn’t try a specific Known Unknown, viz., the Impossible Burger at Umami Burger, for so long, despite having been urged to do so by numerous people. I could never quite articulate a rational reason why I’d never tried it. Eventually, my refusal to give it a shot was distilled down to a prejudice against meatless burgers.

Sunday afternoon, then, can serve as living proof that the tides of progress are inexorable. It was then, after all, that I faced up to my prejudice, went to Umami Burger in the Arts District, and tried the Impossible Burger. The woke architects of my spiritual improvement? Kelsey and her mother. Who else?

The Order: The Impossible Burger

The Price: $16

The Burger
Most prejudices are not well-founded. If, however, you share my (roiling) prejudice against meatless burgers, though, you know this specific prejudice is the exception to that rule. The essential feature of a great burger is that juxtaposition between charred skin and juicy meat. It’s the foundation stone for a dish, the central appeal of which is textural contrasts. Smooth sauces; silky cheese; juicy, explosive meat; crisp, parchment-like lettuce; the burst of juicy tomatoes; and an airy bun all exist together in one unified whole.

The epicenter of that textural mix, the one constant, is the patty. No matter how many different burgers you try, what makes them all burgers is the presence of that meaty anchor. It needn’t be beef, but it needs to be charred on the outside and juicy on the inside. Most meatless patties fail because they don’t provide both of those features. They may be crisp on the outside, but then they’re lifeless inside. Or maybe they’re moist inside, but then they can’t offer that grill-crisped shell.

So, if you ever breathlessly have protested, “A meatless burger is not a burger,” then you understand that you aren’t making a crassly presented judgment on the relative values of two objectively coequal members of a category; to the contrary, you’re making a definitional claim, namely, that a burger needs a patty that is charred and juicy. Meatless patties aren’t charred and juicy (at best, customarily, they’re one or the other). It would follow a burger built around a meatless patty isn’t a burger at all; it’s just a, like, fried lentil sandwich or something.

Tempting as it is to venture further down the “What is a burger?” rabbit hole, I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say, the Impossible Burger complicates the calculus a great deal. The patty is made of a proprietary blend of…well, not-meat things (wheat, coconut oil, and other not-meats; the precise mix is, apparently, a secret). The idea is that it’s a legitimate alternative to meat (it even looks like beef before you cook it) from a taste and texture standpoint, but without the nasty ecological impact that attends the production of meat.

The flagship ingredient is heme. Without getting too esoteric, heme is an iron-laden porphyrin (a class of organic molecule). Its most famous work is in hemoglobin–that stuff in your blood that carries oxygen. A lesser-known work in its oeuvre is that it’s a big part of what makes meat…meat. You can find heme in all living things. You may wonder how such a compound wound up in a “meatless” burger. The answer is that the heme used in the Impossible Burger is generated by introducing the gene in soybeans that encodes the heme protein into yeast, and–

I can feel myself losing you. Okay. I’ll just dish on the burger.

The presentation, I think, is meant to highlight just how meat-like this patty is. Two Impossible burger patties are smothered in American cheese, caramelized onions, mustard, spread, pickles, lettuce, and tomato. If that sounds utterly conventional, it is; and that’s precisely the point. The goal here is to challenge the eater to distinguish this in a meaningful way from what you flipped off a grill with a spatula and slapped between sponge buns with a careless spray of mustard and ketchup and whatever garnishes you could snatch on the way to the cooler to grab a Coke.

To be sure; you will be able to taste the difference. There are stronger notes of mushroom in this burger than you’d note in a beef patty. But you also probably won’t dispute that this is, undoubtedly, a burger. Calling it a “carnivore’s dream” might be something of a stretch, but it’s miles away from being a carnivore’s nightmare. The impression it leaves is more like a beef burger than a Gardenburger: There is char. The patty is juicy. It is flavorful. And (this is, after all, still Umami Burger) it is overcooked.

And again, because this is Umami Burger, the garnishes are largely uninspired, the miso-mustard tries hard but won’t lay you flat, and the spread lacks piquancy. The bun is just a hair shy of being too dry for comfort. The whole thing doesn’t sing; it just kind of murmurs unobtrusively. But you don’t care about all that. You know all that. What you want to know is whether the patty is worth trying. The answer is a resounding yes.

If you’re anything like me, your aversion to trying this burger is the product of prejudice rather than judgment. It likely emanates from a feeling that meatless alternatives aren’t alternatives at all; they’re just an aggravating failed imitation from people who have made a reasonable choice to not eat meat, but then show an unreasonable unwillingness to stay in their proverbial lane. But the Impossible Burger isn’t just the product of vegan FOMO. It’s the product of an impulse for ecologically responsible consumption. And vegan FOMO.

Whatever its genesis, the product has some merit and deserves attention. Is the Impossible Burger as good as a beef patty? No. But unlike its meatless forebears, that’s a question worth asking. Time to get woke.

The Ratings
Flavor: 8.50 / 10.00
Freshness: 8.00 / 10.00
Value: 8.10 / 10.00
Efficiency: 9.00 / 10.00
Creativity / Style: 10.00 / 10.00
Bun: 7.80 / 10.00
Patty: 8.70 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.00 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.00 / 10.00
Balance: 8.80 / 10.00

Total: 84.90 / 100.00

Love & Salt

May 18, 2017 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

The Place
Love & Salt
317 Manhattan Beach Boulevard
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266

You probably can’t live in Manhattan Beach. The prices are too high; the lifestyle is too idyllically Californian; the people are too beautiful for their age; the parking is too scarce. Most importantly, perhaps, the quality restaurants are too few. While higher dining options exist – M.B. Post, Fishing With Dynamite, and the subject of this review, Love & Salt – the culinary scene in Manhattan Beach would perhaps most aptly be characterized as “family friendly.” Perfect if you like Pitfire Pizza, less so if your preferences skew toward street food, fusion or small plates.

But Manhattan Beach really does encapsulate the Southern California lifestyle, or at least what many people outside Southern California would imagine our lifestyle to be. It’s mostly white, mostly rich, mostly sunny, mostly upscale, mostly clean, mostly successful, and mostly USC alumni. It exemplifies the relaxed affluence that is more closely associated with Southern California than with anywhere else. You’ll spot an off-puttingly muscular forty-something year old man strolling down Manhattan Beach Boulevard with impossibly adorable children, his bronze arms bursting from Rip Curl t-shirts, salt-and-pepper hair cut close, smiling through his Maui Jim sunglasses at the cards life dealt him. And just when you think you might live a life like his one day, you see the glint of the alabaster dial on his $20,000 watch as it catches the sun just so, and you’ll remember that this is not your place.

In spite of being inaccessible, though, I can’t shake the feeling whenever I’m in Manhattan Beach that there’s something missing there (besides minorities, I mean). It’s a city that lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. It’s beachy, it’s Californian, there’s a Marine Layer, and the schools are top-notch, sure, but it feels fundamentally anti-urban. It’s oddly devoid of genuine culture. It’s an ecosystem, not a city.

If you’re looking for a B(a)esha Rodell-approved break from the blocks upon blocks of suburban ennui (and you are lucky enough to find a parking spot), you might stop in at Michael Fiorelli’s Love & Salt. Chef Michael Fiorelli’s food is described by the restaurant as Italian-inspired, but “with a California soul.” It may be that soul animating the splash of salsa verde on the grilled octopus, or (depending on how forgiving you feel) the presence of gluten-free pasta. Good-natured ribbing aside, the food here is good. The cocktails are excellent as well. It may not be the most innovative menu in the world, but come on; this is still Manhattan Beach.

One item for which Love & Salt has become quietly regarded is a burger, which was inspired neither by Italy nor the restaurant’s soul, but rather by a particularly intransigent regular customer who persisted in ordering a burger in spite of there not being one on the menu. Chef Fiorelli finally relented and, using what ingredients he had on hand, he served what is now known as the Downlow Burger. It recently received sterling plaudits from local tastemakers, so I predictably felt compelled to sample it. In the spirit of its origins, the Downlow Burger remains off the menu (as in, on the down low) at dinner, but they make a limited run of twelve per day during weekend brunch. Calling ahead to request a set-aside is advisable. Kelsey, Kristen, Tristan and I did just that, and took in a Saturday brunch there.

The Order: the Downlow Burger

The Price: $16

The Burger
The Downlow Burger consists of two substantial black angus beef patties, fontina cheese, caramelized onions, housemade pickles, and a tomato aioli, all on brioche. Probably the highest praise I can heap on this burger is that it presents like a cousin of Petit Trois. It’s a saucy, paradoxical thing: minimalistic but indulgent, familiar but challenging, understated but brazen. Like Ludo’s masterwork, it eschews typical garnishment in favor of fewer, bolder flavors, assembled purposefully to complement one another.

The beef is the anchor, and though it was overcooked (and therefore a touch gritty), it was juicy and bursting with savor that stabilized every bite. The fontina cheese added a lightly botanical quality, while its fruit and nut notes seeped into the meat, giving it a subtle sweetness that interacted well with the caramelized onions, the residual tang of which, in turn, married nicely with the delicate sourness of the pickles. The buns hold everything together, but don’t impress too much in their own right.

The really impressive choice here was the tomato aioli. While the tomato flavor was the right call, ketchup would have been too ham-fisted, too obvious, too sharp, and it wouldn’t have fit in the context of this burger, which decidedly is aiming for gourmet status. By presenting the tomato as an aioli, Fiorelli manages to present the right flavor, but with a softer touch. It’s a really sophisticated, thoughtful, creative stroke, and it elevates this burger and preserves a balanced flavor profile. It’s no bordelaise sauce mounted with foie gras, but come on; this is still Manhattan Beach.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.20 / 10.00
Freshness / Quality: 9.50 / 10.00
Value: 8.40 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.70 / 10.00
Creativity / Style: 9.20 / 10.00
Bun: 8.20 / 10.00
Patty: 8.70 / 10.00
Toppings: 9.50 / 10.00
Sauce: 9.80 / 10.00
Balance: 9.60 / 10.00

Total: 90.80 / 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

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

Dudley Market

April 11, 2016April 11, 2016 ~ prachandrasoma ~ 1 Comment

The Place

Dudley Market
9 Dudley Avenue
Venice, CA 90291

Reservations: 424.744.8060
Bar: Beer and wine only

Sunday was a difficult day. Not in the sense that it was a strenuous day. Just because it reminded me of the tortured relationship I maintain with Venice.

When I lived on the East Coast, Venice pretty nearly captured everything I missed about home. The sun’s rays so bright you swear you can see resplendent gold blades against the implausibly blue sky. The heat of those rays on your skin tempered by the ocean breeze. The way that breeze that picks up and swirls stray grains of sand. The way that sand manages to get between your toes, even when you’ve worn shoes. The seemingly anti-gravitational lean of palm trees in the briny air. All the beautiful people walking down sidewalks peering into the windows of high-end boutiques, passing through the aromatic clouds drifting up and over from food trucks idling on the blacktop.

And speaking of food, Venice has long been a culinary center in Los Angeles. The Tasting Kitchen and Gjelina, by now, are old news (but still newsworthy). More recently, veteran culinary icons (Josiah Citrin) and young upstarts (Top Chef winner Nyesha Arrington) have laid down roots there as well.

The TL;DR version of all that is that there’s a lot to love in Venice: weather, sunshine, the beach, and delicious food. For a time, I was dead-set on living in Venice upon returning to Los Angeles.

After that drooling paean, what, you ask, makes my relationship with Venice “tortured?”

Because, before eating a quite-good brunch at the charming Dudley Market, you have to proceed through a gauntlet of challenges that Venice lays before all those who come to share in its beachside bounty. First, you have to park. Basically, that amounts to crawling through labyrinthine side streets and alleys, doing your damndest to not commit a tort against one of the actually psychotic cyclists swerving in and out of your path. As you do, you’ll be flanked on one side by side streets running perpendicular to you, all packed with cars, and on the other side by totally vacant beachside lots charging a cash-only $20 flat rate – a rate that frugality and mulish pride won’t let you pay.

Then you get out of your car (after displaying an embarrassing lack of parallel parking acumen for a crowd of dead-eyed, unwashed, and dreadlocked white people), and you’re forced to really see Venice. Sun-bronzed hippies, carelessly half-naked, leaning against the walls of grubby and overpriced apartment buildings, weirdly unaffected by the strange funk the beach breeze carries from nearby dumpsters. Hungover bros speeding down those alleys in their fathers’ leased Teslas. Bottle blondes in garish $600 sunglasses from last season, oozing a petulant, practiced apathy through bar-battered bangs. Tourists, drenched in sweat and marveling at the spectacle of all these disparate demographics coexisting seamlessly. And even if you’re a native, you’ll find yourself marveling at it too. It’s staggering, stereotypically Californian, and a little gross.

But Venice is like an old friend. She may occasionally annoy or disgust, but it doesn’t take much to remind you of why you love her and are lucky to have her around. As pissed as I was about parking, and about feeling like a millennial Frogger dodging $100,000 electric cars, it all melted away when I felt that breeze come in off the Pacific . Any residual impatience was obliterated when I took the first sip of Dudley Market’s stellar espresso milkshake with the beach at my back.

I didn’t go for the milkshake, of course. Kelsey and I stopped in at Jesse Barber’s new spot to try the Burger Diane.

The Order: Burger Diane (beef/pork patty, gruyere, melted onions, greens, dijon, mushroom, and pickles on sourdough hybrid).

You might ask yourself, “Why is it called a Burger Diane?” It’s likely a play on steak Diane, which is a filet mignon in a mushroom and Dijon mustard-based sauce (there’s more to it than that, like heavy cream and brandy or something, I think; but this isn’t Delmonico’s and I’m not Emeril Lagasse).

The Price: $16 (before tax)

The Burger
Jesse Barber worked at Barnyard before, and it shows. Dudley Market emphasizes the use of high quality, local, seasonal ingredients above haute-cuisine technique. The espresso milkshake features housemade ice cream, which gets its high protein content from the biodynamic duck eggs (from Moorpark) they use to make it. The greens that flanked our burger (some also made their way onto it, actually) were obsessively fresh, drizzled only in lemon juice and oil. The bacon is from a pig that was butchered less than a week ago in-shop. It’s all very L.A.

The burger is built around a patty that is about 60% beef and 40% bacon. It’s cooked just barely on the rare side of medium (there’s no pink). My worry was that the beef would be overcooked to ensure the pork was cooked through, which would give rise to a dry patty with very little personality on the front end, with pork fat and salt dominating the finish.

My worries were misplaced. The beef was cooked through but still juicy, and the pork was subtle, adding salty complexity without overwhelming things. I did not leave Dudley Market convinced that the hybrid patty is a better approach than just cooking an all-beef patty medium rare and putting bacon on top of it, but I am convinced that I was wrong to think you can’t build a good burger around a hybrid patty. You can. Barber has.

The bun is what our server called a “sourdough hybrid,” grilled and pressed into flat discs, dusted with poppy seeds and salt flakes. The crust is buttery and crisp, while the inside maintains the unmistakable just-dry-enough sponginess of sourdough.

The highlight of this burger, though – even more than the estimable patty – was the interplay between the gruyere cheese and the mushrooms. The gruyere is sweet and nutty, tangling nicely with meaty, bold mushroom. The pairing is formidable, and it hits hard early. Less than halfway through the first bite, these two ingredients alone make it clear that this burger is not for the faint of heart.

The cheese and mushrooms are an earthy, complex overture to the surprisingly graceful and tasteful mash-up of beef and bacon that follows. Just as the savor reaches its climax – at the moment when it’s all about to get a bit too “forest floor and barnyard gore” for good taste – the pickles emerge as if out of nowhere, bright but not too briny, offering a little kick of acid to clean everything up, the ideal prelude to the sweet, mustardy finish.

Only the melted onions, cooked even past the point of caramelized sweetness, seem superfluous; they lurk like emo kids at lunch, hidden from the rest of the flavor profile. That’s a disappointing but hardly damning flaw in an otherwise superb preparation, as well-balanced as it is creative.

I guess Dudley Market is kind of a microcosm of Venice itself: There are aggravations – notably, slow service and steep prices – but on balance, there are more reasons to return than to stay away (but order with care, as the menu decidedly is not uniformly inspiring; the speck with burrata and balsamic was simple and arresting despite the absence of the advertised poached apple, but the crab louie was little more than an incoherent jumble of pleasant things).

Yes, you’ll need to budget a bit of time for your meal; this place isn’t exactly run with German efficiency (though if you have an enchanting companion and an espresso milkshake to keep you company while you wait, you won’t mind the wait so much). And yes, the burger specifically – and Dudley Market more generally – is as overpriced as the surrounding real estate. But unlike the surrounding real estate, there’s more to Dudley Market than a nice view and convenient beach access. So stop in and try this burger. Consider it one more reminder why you love Venice in spite of the fact that it’s so…Venice.

The Ratings
Flavor: 9.20 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 10.00 / 10.00
Value: 8.00 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.00 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 9.40 / 10.00
Bun: 9.20 / 10.00
Patty: 9.30 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.30 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.50 / 10.00
Balance: 9.00 / 10.00

Total: 88.90 / 100.00

Messhall Kitchen

August 19, 2015August 19, 2015 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

Before I start, a prefatory remark. I apologize for the long delay between posts. I have been busy being an enormous catch. File this under not-so-humble humblebrag. Point is, I’ve been too occupied reading internet comments about myself and looking longingly at my own picture to eat or write about burgers. Sorry not sorry. In related news: my being featured in that campaign hasn’t made women more attracted to me. At all.

ANYWAY. Let’s talk about Messhall.

For most people, Los Feliz triggers one of three thoughts:

Los Feliz Boulevard at rush hour is one of the most compelling pieces of proof of a malevolent God;

Do I pronounce it like the Spanish (Los “Fe-LEES”) or do I pronounce it like the transplants who live here say it (Los “FEE-liz”)?;

Oh, that’s a nice place to, like, raise a young family.

If you’re me, you also think of late nights with friends at House of Pies and the 101 Café after concerts at the Wiltern, but that’s because I’m a fat kid with a nostalgic streak. You might also think of Mexico City. Or Little Dom’s (whose burger this Project imminently will tackle). What you probably don’t think of is the flourishing restaurant scene. And why would you? Sure, Los Feliz is a cool part of Los Angeles, but it really hasn’t managed to produce a real blockbuster restaurant like Downtown, mid-city, or Silver Lake have. Unless you count Sqirl. Sqirl is good. Plus, saying you got brunch there makes you hip, plugged-in, and trendy. And you can sit with people who are too cool to go to Alcove (because, like, who even does that anymore?), but who want to wear their sunglasses while they take down their frittata, or seared polenta, or whatever.

(I actually like Sqirl, but targets don’t come much easier than their clientele.)

Listen, the point is the culinary pickings in Los Feliz are pretty slim. It’s not clear that Messhall Kitchen is aiming to change the culinary reputation of Los Feliz all by itself. But it’s safe to say that this place might augur a tectonic shift in the food scene here. Their menu offers quietly multicultural and just-inventive-enough takes on comfort foods. The sweet potato tamale weds sweet corn with slow-braised, drippy pork chile verde. The poutine features fries soggy after being slathered in short-rib and cheese curds. With time, places like Messhall could well change the culinary complexion of Los Feliz (interesting, because the co-owner, Bill Chait, owns Louise’s Trattoria, one of the most aggressively uninteresting culinary experiences you can have in Los Angeles County).

But Kevin, McAdoo, and I didn’t go to taste the ground floor of a sea change in the culinary profile of Los Feliz. We went to try Messhall’s vaunted burger. Well, and McAdoo was there to help defray the simmering perception that Kevin and I have a weird relationship (we aren’t dating).

The Place
Messhall Kitchen
4500 Los Feliz Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90027

The Order: Mess Burger

The Price: $16 (before tax, includes fries)

The Burger
So okay, here’s a brief anatomical rundown of the burger. There’s a bun the size of North Dakota. Then, a substantial – say between one-third and one-half pound – patty drenched in what Messhall mysteriously dubs their “smokey sauce” (I’m resisting the impulse to make a crass joke about the forest fire safety bear), a sweet, runny, terra cotta condiment in which tangy belts of slow onion swim about. Crunchy discs of bread and butter pickles are also bathed in the sauce, but not enough to hide their charming, sweet and briny bite. A leathery sheet of nutty white cheddar is melted over the patty, almost to the point of liquidity.

If that sounds like a wonderful mix of flavors to you, I agree. Unfortunately, I can’t really report to you how they interact. The bun in this burger is so structurally dominant that it actually becomes physically intrusive. It is so enormous that, with every bite, it folds over and envelops the rest of the ingredients, masking their respective flavors and their interactions with one another. Whatever subtlety there is in this burger is completely obliterated by an overmassive bun that is kind of like a pushy salesman; it just won’t let anyone else get a word in.

In one sense, I get it: the patty is juicy and there is a lot of sauce on this burger. This bun avoids the problem of over-absorption and sogginess to which a less substantial bun might have been susceptible. But for God’s sake, there’s a happy medium in there somewhere. This was way over the top. Ultimately, I had to physically deconstruct this burger to actually taste the other ingredients. I removed the top bun and put it aside, and ate the burger open-faced with a fork and knife. Which made me look, well, not great. And was pretty ridiculous. But I do what I have to do, damn it.

Anyway, the patty was very high quality. Our server confidently recommended that we order it rare, and the meat’s natural flavor could support that preparation. The sauce tasted fine but was poorly portioned; it crowded out the other flavors, such that everything else was muddied in a smokey-sweet haze. The pickles were present, but too inextricably linked to the sauce for their flavor to shine on its own. The onions were effectively lost in the soupy swirl of the sauce. The cheese complemented the rare beef well, providing a mellow counterpart to the assertive savor of the patty.

No one should be heard to criticize this burger for the quality of its ingredients. Even the fundamental ideas informing the assembly are sound. The problem is one of proportion. The burger is oversauced, but more importantly, features a bun that literally swallows the rest of the dish. The result is a dry, spongy front end to every bite that gives way to a muddle of ingredients too chewed-up to appreciate its individual components.

One more thing: this burger is very, very expensive. For sixteen bucks, I expect something truly memorable. In one sense, Messhall gave me that. I remember this burger, just not for the right reasons. I remember this burger because it’s bun got all up in my grill (literally), and didn’t let me taste anything else. I remember it because it tasted way too much like I was eating two uncharacteristically filling pieces of bread. I remember it because I actually thought, “Man, if I want a bunch of meat and shit wrapped in bread, I’ll eat a Hot Pocket. That takes three minutes, costs a few bucks, and I can do it in my sweats.” Not the right kind of memorable.

For now, I’ll reserve judgment as to whether Messhall portends a change in the culinary scene in Los Feliz. That’s a bigger question, one more effectively addressed by someone with a deeper knowledge than I. What I can tell you is this: this burger gets a lot of good ingredients together. The sauce is distinctive but also somehow familiar. There is real potential for something special here. But the experiment is botched due to its imbalance. So if Messhall does want to spearhead a change in the food future of Los Feliz, it probably won’t do it on the back of this burger, which is good – maybe even great – in concept, but just about average in execution.

The Ratings
Flavor: 8.30 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 9.40 / 10.00
Value: 5.80 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.90 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 8.60 / 10.00
Bun: 4.10 / 10.00
Patty: 9.10 / 10.00
Sauce: 8.90 / 10.00
Toppings: 8.80 / 10.00
Balance: 4.00 / 10.00

Total: 75.90 / 100.00

Pharo’s Burgers

August 9, 2015 ~ prachandrasoma ~ Leave a comment

I was going to have a snappy photo of the bacon cheeseburger from Pharo’s Burgers. Then some dudes threw me into a pool, and my phone’s soul exploded. As a result, no picture, just a link to some other dude’s picture, which I can assure you is a faithful rendering.

There are some places you just don’t really ever check out, and don’t really hear much about either. That cool movie theatre that only plays old movies in the town where you went to college. The hike in Malibu with all those amazing views. That one coffee shop that serves coffee drinks in mason jars and makes that delicious sandwich with the prosciutto. The Warhol exhibit at that museum on the other side of town. The BodyWorks exhibit at the California Science Center. Encino.

File Pharo’s Burgers under that category. I was born and raised in Pasadena, but nobody mentioned it was any good. I never really heard about it, and I never really cared to explore it…so I never did. Recently, though, my friend Jackson told me to check it out. He goes there quite often and swore by it. What the hell, right? So yesterday, Kevin, Shanil, and I went to give it a try.

The Place
Pharo’s Burgers
1129 North Garfield Avenue
Alhambra, CA 91801

The Order: Bacon Cheeseburger

The Price: $5.95

The Burger
If you haven’t heard about this place, honestly, it’s probably because there isn’t much to say. And that’s not entirely a pejorative; Pharo’s Burgers keeps it simple. This burger is about as unfussy as it gets: a heap of shredded lettuce steeped in weakly tangy Thousand Island, a slightly jaundiced (but juicy enough) disc of tomato, a thin sheet of not-very-melted cheese, a quarter-pound chuck patty, and several strips of crumpled bacon.

Each ingredient played its role admirably, filling a very specific niche in the burger’s flavor profile. The Thousand Islands had a meek tang to it that brightened the coppice of lettuce a bit. The tomato was not of the finest caliber, mushier than it was firm. The patty was overcooked (likely intentionally so), char-broiled well past medium. The bacon was salty and crisp, providing the intended depth of flavor and textural variety, but not much more than that.

I don’t know; it was a bacon cheeseburger. Nothing felt misplaced or misguided, but nothing felt inspired. Everything here has been done before: It has been done better, and it has been done worse. It’s hard to be anything but frustratingly noncommittal. I imagine it is a little maddening to read a review that fails to adopt a firm stance – sorry – but this burger does not lend itself to roiling passion. It’s a competently executed but largely uninteresting offering. Pharo’s Burgers puts out a dish that is impossible to love or to hate. It is a place and a burger to which you will not object to returning…if prompted.

But some places, you just don’t really ever check out.

The Ratings
Flavor: 7.60 / 10.00
Freshness/Quality: 7.40 / 10.00
Value: 8.30 / 10.00
Efficiency: 8.90 / 10.00
Creativity/Style: 5.00 / 10.00
Bun: 7.00 / 10.00
Patty: 7.40 / 10.00
Toppings: 7.20 / 10.00
Sauce: 7.10 / 10.00
Balance: 8.30 / 10.00

Total: 74.20 / 100.00