Every blog must address the hamburger.  Like the blog, the hamburger is cheap, simple, and of the people.  Nina and I periodically discuss our love of the hamburger, whenever we’re not fighting about whether my scarf is adequately covering my neck.  And feeling the need to blog about something, and with the necessity of a sleight-of-hand distraction from GlobalFest, which I was adamant about not attending, we took a short trip to Corner Bistro to sample their burger offerings, rumoured to be some of the best in the city.

Corner Bistro is a cramped little bar serving simple food, which seemingly upholds the meaning of быстро, the Russian word for quick, said to be a possible origin of the word bistro.  But as we waited longer than expected on line for one of the few tables in the back, standing in the narrow bottleneck section of the hourglass-shaped space, it was I, not Nina, who became impatient.  As an anxiety attack began to take hold, I asked Nina repeatedly if we could leave immediately, but she was not to be deterred from her hamburger so easily.  If she was not going to GlobalFest, she was eating a hamburger.

Before I had thoroughly cold-sweated through my clothing, we were seated at a grimy corner wooden table near the back exit, where the door openings and closings by departing diners and the all-Mexican restaurant staff created a cold draft.  I proactively adjusted my scarf.  We ordered Bistro burgers, fries, and a cold draught.  The table had a series of names etched in the wood, but unfortunately I hadn’t brought my knife.

The hamburgers arrived.  At first sight they seemed relatively small.  But what they lacked in girth, they made up for in depth.  Each dish was served on a small plastic plate, with plastic forks, and no napkins.  Nina’s water came with no ice, exactly how she had asked for it.

The hamburgers were split in half, laid with the two sides of the bun facing upward.  On top of one half of the bun lay a few concentric rings of sliced onion, iceburg lettuce and an unabashedly unripe tomato slice.  On the other half of the bun stood the burger patty, barely-melted American cheese, and three pieces of stiff, curly bacon that broke but did not bend.  I ate a bacan piece immediately just to reduce the space it consumed.  Beside the sesame-smattered buns, cramped into the only remaining space on the plate lay three ridge-cut slices of lacklustre vinegar pickle.

Lifting up the burger patty from the bun, I slid in two, and only two, slices of pickle (the third would not have fit on the bun) underneath the patty, placed together the two halves of the burger, and took the first bite.

Sweaty foreboadings aside, the burger was good.  The meat was cooked medium-rare, the way I like it (and the way I had ordered it).  A bit of beef juice driveled down onto the plastic plate.  The first few bites were restricted to the bottom third of the burger, since it was not possible to fit the entire depth of the burger in my mouth at once.  But this situation was quickly remedied, and before Nina and I could thoroughly discuss our objective impressions of the veracity of the positive reviews we’d read online, my burger had become a part of me, integrated into my very being, and as a result, I found myself anxiously shoveling hard, dry french fries down my throat.

As I sit here hours later digesting in the comfort of my home, I come to the conclusion that the Corner Bistro burger is good.  It has the core elements of a hamburger: bun and meat.  The bun is not noteworthy, besides the convenience it proffers of being able to almost grasp the burger neatly in two hands.  The meat is of an acceptable quality, good flavor, and cooked perfectly.  The vegetable garnishes offer more in the way of texture than in flavor, and certainly have little-to-none nutritional value.  The pickle was so forgettable that I am non-linearly adding this sentence hours after initially writing this post, just to be thorough.  The bacon is not freshly cooked, brittle, and with little flavor besides saltiness.  If there were anything resembling cheese on top, I would write about it.

Despite what could be considered shortcomings in both ancillary ingredients and three-dimensional structure of the hamburger, the overall flavor was quite pleasing, and the textures of the components seemlessly integrated.  Corner Bistro burger is a good, solid, standard hamburger with no frills.  I’m sure there is a great hamburger waiting for me somewhere else.