Five Guys is easily the best of the bad hamburgers.  The bun is the kind of bun you find in the supermarket.  The beef tastes like the beef you buy at the supermarket.  The mustard tubs are of the cheap yellow kind.  All burgers are well done with a bit of crispiness to the beef.  The servers seem like they were lured away from the employment pool of the Alfred Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.  But they look like they know how to barbecue.  This is how a fast food burger chain should be: unexceptional and cheap.  It’s your hamburger.

A theme restaurant gone awry

Just a regular hamburger

As if an explanation is necessary

Good riddance to Burritoville

Nestled at the long-neglected corner of Manhattan Avenue and Bedford Avenue, the Brooklyn meeting point of the two formerly distinct but now inseperable worlds of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, lies Five Leaves, a diner with the carefully and successfully constructed ambiance of an imaginary simpler American rustic past.

On to the hamburger:

Five Leaves Burger

The beef is grass-fed, which calmed my own stomach considering my very recent screening of Food, Inc., in which an industrial cow researcher sticks his hand elbow-deep through a port drilled into the side of a fully-conscious cow, giving him access to the contents of one of its stomachs, where he mashes around and shows off the rotting corn (i.e. not grass) inside.

But for full disclosure, I am working on the assumption that, as I believe is necessary for gastronomical honesty and integrity, judgment lies mostly in the hamburger, not in the contents of the cow’s stomach (which is nowhere to be found at Five Leaves) at the moment of its murder.  And in this department, the Five Leaves Burger is a great mashup, regardless of whether the long dead, extruded and now medium-rare cooked cow of questionable upbringing had arugula or rubber tire as its last supper.

The bun at Five Leaves was very well educated, and had a crispiness to the outermost layer of refined white flour that did not seem to be the result of any significant toasting.  The innards of the top bun were doused in mayo mixed with red pepper powder.  Then came the perfectly cooked sunny-side up egg with no evidence of any frying visible on either top or bottom.  Beneath the egg was a solitary slice of beet, lying astride the meat patty itself.

The first bite released the unfertilized juices pregnant within the egg, which flowed through the home-made prophylactic of mixed salad I surreptitiously inserted directly beneath, and were eventually lapped up greedily by the soft absorptive inner lining nascent in the bottom bun, spilling out the overflow mixture of blood and amniotic fluid onto the fresh green side of salad.  The meat patty was crispily overcooked on a few rough outer edges, but soft and tender medium rare on the inside, exactly as requested.

Conclusion:  delicious burger, but the meat was oversalted such that I would be remiss in not mentioning it in this otherwise perfectly good review.

Mention your love of hamburgers, and some people will proselytize about Shake Shack the same way America’s Generation X enthralls itself with the seamless digital/analog convergence found in Avatar, the 3D feature film.

Shake Shack is a half block from my current workplace, but the lines are far too intimidating for me to ever venture near in temperate climes.  Given my inexplicable love of cold weather and far more easily understandable Christmastime goy aversion, today, the freezing day before the day before the two thousand and tenth year anniversary of the birth of our savior (when will he finish battling the aliens and come back?), seemed like the perfect opportunity to skip the fuss and buy a slab of ground meat.  Even my office, teeming as it is with dollar bill-eyed Jews from New Jersey, was relatively empty.  And so, there was no line at Shake Shack.

Shake Shack in Madison Square Park

A brief survey of the menu made my order clear: one Shackburger, and a Shackmeister Ale.  In exchange for $10, I received a vibrator and a receipt.

Unsanitized Shake Shack Vibrator

I gripped the vibrator tightly, and waited.  About five minutes later, I felt a single prolonged buzz, then nothing.  My food was ready.

Shackburger and Shackmeister Ale

Quite the presentation.  The bun was extremely soft and pliant, so much so that the bread was depressed and obliging before I had even had a chance to put it in my hot and steamy mouth, anticipating, as it was, its own unavoidable absorption into my greedy Semitic stomach.

First impression: the taste of American cheese.  Second bite: lots of mayonnaise….  and so it went.  The meat replicated perfectly the texture and flavor of the textureless and flavorless bun.  A swig of beer:  market research indicates that Generation X likes hops.  No discernible flavor, good or bad, beyond the uber-infused hop essence.  Further reflection on hamburger: lettuce was latticed on top of the burger in clear full-leaf form, and a real slice of a real tomato was purposefully placed between.  The meat looked very fatty and pale, well done.

The aesthetic and genius of Shake Shack couldn’t be clearer.  Shackburger is a McDonalds burger made with upscale ingredients.  That is its ironic design, get it?  Shackmeister Ale is Budweiser pumped full of hops, i.e. microbrew.  Compared to the eating habits of the typical office worker, this is gourmet food at its finest.

Within minutes, I had retreated back to the comfort of the office.  I emailed the client and my entire team a new user flow diagram with the image of a cute girl representing their company’s typical “content editor”.  This based on a conversation I had had before lunch with the client’s chief technologist about the flow, not about the girl.

User Flow

The client immediately sent a response, insisting that their content editors were not nearly as happy nor as enthusiastic as this girl, and demanded that this fact be properly accounted for in future revisions.  I quipped in response that this was because they had yet to use the system I was designing, and asked him to be patient.

At Benny’s troubled request, I removed the inappropriate girl from the next revision.

Neuter Actor

Then Benny invited me to join him and Brian, the front-end developer who loved Avatar, in a three-way of Super Mario Brothers on the Wii by the jelly bean machines.

At 6, I left, encountering our Director of Emerging Technology twiddling his phone by the elevator.  I asked him politely what his plans were for the holiday.  He’s clearly Jewish, but kept reticent about that fact.  We entered the elevator with a black man and two goyim.  I explained my own modest plans: “I’m heading up to Westchester, where it’s safe for Jews on Christmas”.

No response.  The doors opened.  I wished him well, and exited.

The inflected words, “Peter Luger Lager” rolled off of the waiter’s tongue with the same rounded satisfaction with which the Peter Luger Burger rolled onto mine.

The Russian-accented maitre d’ had, not without practiced hesitation, allowed us a chance to be seated in the perfectly empty dining room for lunch despite our lack of reservation.  Our mildly Euro waiter, upon hearing of our plebian burger-eating ambitions, curtly countered, with not the least hint of disapproval in his mildly Euro voice, “I will get your drinks, but someone else will be your waiter”, only to return a few minutes later, “I will be your waiter after all.”

A steakhouse is a man’s retreat.  Preservation of the sanctity of the bloody bond between animal-eating brothers is, by necessity, relegated to ritual. All the symbols and significances must be in their proper place before a feast can begin in trust and tranquility.  Hence the questioning looks and probing eyes of the two men in our Peter Luger life.  So too my immediate declaration that menus were unecessary and my utterance of the code word, “hamburger”.  And once their intentions and our appetites had been exposed and signs of mutual recognition exchanged, we were served with nothing but attention, understanding, and congeniality by our hosts and we responded in kind.

Our waiter had advised that the vegetable side-dishes which I had been naively investigating were not necessary.  “Usually the hamburger, bacon, and fries are enough, I think” he said with the type of wry understated grin that would have looked obscene on an American.  But a drink was condoned, if not insinuated.

Peter Luger Lager is surprisingly delicious.  Peter Luger bacon is thick, flavorful, sumptuous, and quite unlike any other bacon I’ve ever tasted.  But there is nothing at all to say about the hamburger.  There is no use going into a protracted analysis. The Peter Luger Hamburger is perfect.

Peter Luger Hamburger

Prior to our viewing of the American Symphony Orchestra’s performance, “Persecution and Hope: Masterworks of Conscience“, Nina and I decided upon a hamburger at PJ Clarke’s across the street from Lincoln Center.  We had in times immemorable sampled the fare at PJ Clarke’s other location in Midtown East and trusted that, given the dearth of remotely palatable places in the near vicinity, we could count on at least a decent hamburger from this mid-scale pub, the kind of place where, at worst, the food is predictably adequate.

As lovers of a good hamburger must, and as a negligent blogger should, we arrived several hours before the performance in order to allow ample time for analysis of the impending hamburger consumption along two axes: immediate flavor impact, and gustation variation over time.  Music-lovers will clearly see the relation between hamburger analysis and earlier notes on the harmony/melody duality of music.

For a hamburger, like a piece of western music, is a multi-faceted thing, ill-treated if considered only in terms of its immediate impact upon one’s sensory receptors.  Variation over time is critical to a modern conception of beauty, as evidenced no more clearly than in the Baptist church, where even gays are beautiful, so long as they’re trying, over time, to change their aberrant ways.  I guess this means that a Baptist homosexual, at any given moment, is like a single dissonant chord.  Put a bunch of dissonant chords together, and you get jazz.

Brussel Sprouts with Bacon at PJ Clarke's

Now I have no idea where that analogy was going, but it definitely was not the reason why I ordered brussel sprouts and fries with the hamburger.  I think that was more a result of the searching eyes of the tall, fresh, young waiter, clearly a by-product of the Mid-West’s dairy industry.  His name was James or Brad or something, and there was no possibility of not ordering a draught beer, brussel sprouts, and fries with the hamburger so long as this blonde Übermensch was asking piercing questions, like, “What will you be ordering today?” and calling me “buddy” as I sat, at least ten years his elder, in my navy blue suit at a picnic tablecloth covered table with my exotic-looking date in full opera getup.

I remembered what I had liked about PJ Clarke’s.  It’s the sort of place where you feel democratized but not compromised.  When Brad brought over the romantic candle to place on our picnic tablecloth, I thanked him, gesturing in Nina’s direction with the words, “Oh, thanks, that’ll do the trick.”  Beautiful Brad, exotic Nina, and I had a good chuckle, and I started to get buzzed.

The hamburgers, draught beer, and brussel sprouts arrived and were of high quality and good.  God, there’s nothing like a brussel sprout to get the beer down.

The hamburger and all the condiments were very good.  If it weren’t for the slightly flavorless beef, I would easily call it a better burger than the Corner Bistro burger.  But flavorless beef being flavorless beef, this hamburger was not better.  I consider that to be a shame because I far prefer the pretentiously casual ambience at PJ Clarke’s to the grimy honest informality of the Corner Bistro.

PJ Clarke's Hamburger with Bacon, Mushrooms, and Swiss Cheese

The fries were as can be expected, and that was exactly what I’d expected.  The pickle on the side was fully sour, which perfectly accompanied the task at hand, despite my usual outspoken preference for its half sour brethren.  Did I mention that the brussel sprouts were cooked to perfection as was the bacon?  The bun, while nondescript, had been lightly toasted on the inside and proved to be a useful force multiplier for handling the entire deliciously oversized package into my mouth.

By the time the mid-level porcelain plates were barren, it was time for the pre-concert lecture by the appreciably dry humoured composer, Richard Wilson.  The lecture proved to be much more engaging than the actual mid-20th century compositions by Luigi Dallapiccola which was thankfully only tangentially its topic.

Across the street, in Alice Tully Hall, Wilson explained the basic concept behind the 12-tone composition technique, something which is so simple, yet so oft misunderstood.  While western classical music has traditionally been “in key”, or tonal, 12-tone compositions are generally not.

Twelve-tone composers pick a theme of 12 non-repeating notes, called a tone row, and use variations upon that theme as a replacement for the affordances that tonality usually offers.  In other words, 12-tone compositions find other ways to make the music interesting over time than the simple techniques of leading notes and cirlcle-of-fifths standard harmonies.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t find atonal music interesting at all.  And Wilson wryly remarked that it may have been better for posterity if Arnold Shoenberg had kept the details of this 12-tone music composition technique in the closet, thus leaving the audience’s focus on the music, not the technique.  How does the music make you feel?

By this point, the hamburger and brussel sprouts had established a solid foundation in my stomach, and judging by my feelings of agility, both mental and physical, the level of quality in the overarching 12-tone hamburger experience was feeling pretty high.  For music, like hamburgers, as I think I’ve mentioned, should be judged along both axes: immediate impact, and variation over time.

It is my firm belief that Luigi Dallapiccola’s operas are not especially interesting in either story or music, but that Richard Wilson is an engaging didact.  The hamburger was great, but the meat could use more flavor.

By the end of the hour, Nina, a girl with no prior musical or culinary instruction, understood perfectly the use of the 12-tone atonal system in contemporary composition and the importance of high quality ingredients.

A thorough comparison of the best hamburgers in the city requires a controlled study in which I methodically order the same, or similar, burgers at each place I deign to visit.  This is not that kind of blog.

With an hour to kill before the showing of Revolutionary Road at BAM Cinematek, it was with great intent and purposefullness that I ordered the Southwestern burger at 67 Burger in Fort Greene.  Why Southwestern? I don’t know, but Nina certainly didn’t approve.  Revolutionary Road?  Because Nina had suffered Defiance, my choice of movies, last week, and I was feeling particularly egalitarian, despite my better instincts.

We are strangers at neither BAM nor 67 Burger.  I usually pick the Parisian burger for myself before our movie dates… and that’s about the extent of my say in the matters at hand.  Nina also goes for the Parisian and the type of subtitled flicks where a gorgeous woman is psychologically abused by her man through no fault of her devoted self; or some poor child is neglected by its domineering parents, undeservedly so considering how sweet and generous it truly is for its tiny not-yet-degenerately-adult sized shape.  We both agree that lately the Parisian is too salty.

Sitting in the back row of the theater, I noisily rustled open the brown paper bag while the trickle of people flooded into the seats in front of us.  I knew they could all hear me unpacking my food, even though they tried not to show it.  Couldn’t they smell it too? Like cockroaches, word spread among the black and white happily integrated cinematek-loving neighborhoodies, and the theater quickly filled up with two toned people removing solid colored winter clothing.

That perceived power over the others’ appatitive senses I felt, added to the anticipation of medium-rare ground beef , really got my blood flowing.  And before I had had a chance to take a photo, a large bite was missing from my burger, as evidenced in photos taken after regaining my composure.

Southwestern burger with a bite missing

My first thought was that it did not taste especially Southwestern.  In fact, it didn’t have much flavor at all.  I had expected chili or some nasty text-mex spice thing for some reason.  Obviously I hadn’t bothered to read the menu.  The only addition that made my burger different from a standard cheeseburger was the use of monterrey jack cheese instead of processed American, whatever that is.  The monterrey jack had pepper embedded in its rubber cement texture, which added a bit of zest, like a handprint in a newly poured sidewalk.

The contents of the burger were, in-fact, relatively standard: bottom bun -> medium rare ground beef -> rubber cement with pepper pieces -> three pickle slices (forming the points of an equilateral triangle) -> a single slice of tomato -> concentric red onion circles -> some sort of menstrual mayonnaise (maybe the pink was a touch of cayenne pepper) -> top bun with a few sesame seeds.

As Nina pointed out after discovering that the Bacon Cheeseburger she had ordered had no bacon, the bun on both our burgers was lightly and nicely toasted, giving them a pleasant soft-but-secure texture.  Her meat patty was covered in melted orange plastic.  67 Burger had been careful enough to choose a cheese that could not easily be identified as American.

Bacon cheeseburger with the bacon missing

The Southwestern burger disappeared very quickly, with no lasting effect on my psyche.  Maybe it was the lack of bacon, but the flavor was pleasant though unremarkable. The monterrey jack cheese with its artificially strong-flavored pepper pieces dominated the palatte, which was not as negative an effect as one would be lead to expect.  Yet, as is not uncommon, Nina was correct: I should undoubtedly have canceled my impulsive order in deference to a regular bacon cheeseburger.

The fact that 67 Burger even offers a Southwestern option may sow the seeds of doubt in the meaty minds of some skittish ground beef gourmands.  But I can tell you that it’s really nothing to worry about.  It’s nothing to even think about.  I’ve forgotten it already.

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.