The Designer Burger (or How to Turn Ground Beef into a Cash Cow)

“A hamburger by any other name costs twice as much. “   Evan Esar (American humorist)

The hamburger, that simple, basic, culinary symbol of American egalitarianism has in recent years gone through a makeover.  What started as a simple ground beef patty resting greasily in a bun has gone designer.  It’s like the kid who goes to Hollywood gets famous, lets success go to his head and then forgets where he came from.  Like that kid who’s traded his Wranglers for a Gucci suit and scorns his old friends, big time chefs are trying to turn the hamburger into an uppity snob.

When I was a kid a hamburger was something that was featured at diners and drive-ins.  People who claimed even a fragment of taste never went to a fine restaurant with the intent of ordering a burger.   If it was even on the menu it was on the kids menu or buried at the bottom of the dinner menu to satisfy the occasional riff-raff who darkened the establishment’s doorstep.  Sometimes it was disguised as something called a diet plate which usually consisted of a burger patty sans bun with some cottage cheese and a couple of canned peach wedges on the side. 

Some years back a restaurant in San Francisco paid homage to the ground beef patty. Hippopotamus Hamburgers on Van Ness Avenue featured an array of burgers on a menu that was creative if sometimes a little misguided (the Sundae Burger with ice cream, hot fudge and a pickle comes to mind).  My parents took me there on a few occasions.  As I recall I usually ordered the Island Burger or the Chili Burger which as the menu described came “covered with chili and beans (it’s a gas).”  The menu even presented a little social commentary.  For example, for 110.69 you could get the Liberationburger described as a “Whole male chauvinist pig – sliced thin – and laid on a water bed by a California girl – presented with bunches of wild organics.”  What I would like to know these many years later; was there some sort of prurient double entedre in that 69 cents or is my dirty little mind working overtime?  I suppose we’ll never know since The Hippo closed in 1987.  But the Hippo Burgers with all the extras from beans to chocolate sauce were still at their core, basic burgers. (For an interesting look at The Hippopotamus Menu follow the link).

Which brings us to today’s top shelf designer burgers.  A few weeks back we found ourselves at a place called Burger Bar.  Located inside downtown San Francisco’s Macy’s, Burger Bar is a big deal apparently for the fact that it’s run by renowned chef Hubert Keller, of Fleur de Lys, one of the haughtier “dining experiences” in San Francisco.  Burger Bar calls itself “the ultimate burger experience.”

Here’s where I have to digress.  When exactly did going out to dinner become a “dining experience?”   Yeah I know, restaurants are trying to couch a meal at their place as being something extraordinary and unforgettable.  If that’s the case we have those at home on a regular basis when my two year old grandson Jackson chows down.  Jackson’s act usually includes smushing food into his face and tossing food overboard from the highchair when he doesn’t like it or is done eating.  Finished with milk?  The sippy cup gets a toss over the shoulder.  The dogs love it.  Like canine groupies they gather around Jackson knowing that sooner or later food magically falls from the sky.  But a restaurant dining experience?  Meh.

But back to burgers.  The starting price for a burger at Burger Bar is $9.75; which gets you the burger, the bun, lettuce, tomatoes, onion and a (one) pickle.  The scam, err, I mean allure is that you get to “build your own burger.”  And like any construction project, building your burger here is fraught with cost overruns.  The menu is divided into sections to allow you to select the various components for your “burger construction experience.”  There is the “dairy” which lists the cheeses, the “garden” with various veggies, the “grill” for grilled add-on, the “pantry” for condiments and the “Hubert Keller retirement fund vault” where you leave your hard earned money (okay this last is a cynical lie). 

Cheese runs about 75 cents unless you opt for blue cheese which is 95 cents as is pepper jack.  Huh?  That’s 20 cents extra for a few slivers of habanero in a 75 cent slice of jack which in the final analysis is just too much jack for some jack.  Bacon runs $1.15.  Okay so except for the jack cheese these add-ons aren’t too terribly outrageous (although $9.75 for the bare bones, so to speak, still seems just wrong).  But then you come to a (one) fried egg which runs $1.95.  A random scientific survey of shoppers -- well, I asked my wife -- revealed that a dozen eggs costs about two bucks or just about 17 cents per egg.  Items from Hubert’s pantry run from .45 for Dijon mustard to two bucks for guacamole.  I bought some avocados at the local super yesterday at 5 for a couple bucks; just sayin’.  Salsa is .95 which is bottomless at any Mexican joint and doesn’t cost one centavo extra.  But where Hubert is really raking in the green is, appropriately enough, in the garden.  Sprouts are .55, baby spinach .80 and sliced cucumber .75. 

If architecture isn’t your game you can get one of the pre-fab burgers, like the American Classic which is as close to the everyman burger as you can get there.  There’s the Surf and Turf Burger; the ruination of two stand-alone classics, hamburger and lobster, accomplished by putting them together under one bun.  If you have deep pockets, for 60 dollars you can get the Rossini which comes with foie gras and shaved truffles.

But Hubert isn’t the only chef to shove a silver spoon in the hamburger’s ass.  And the burger is no longer buried in the bottom of the menu.  Why would it be when a chef can command 15 to 20 dollars or more for ground beef by throwing in some highfalutin add ons and a fancy name?  In San Francisco for instance there are:

                The Zuni Café which offers a 6 ½ ounce burger for 15 dollars.  Would you like fries with that?  That will be 6 dollars sir, and that means your burger meal costs more than a double sawbuck.  Zuni’s burger isn’t offered on the regular dinner menu.  It’s available only after 10 PM which caters to the post -performance crowd from the local opera house.  You have to ask yourself just how good can this burger be if you can eat it while dressed in your going to the opera duds?  Any self-respecting burger has to carry the veiled threat that it will deposit an unhealthy splotch of grease on that tux. 

                Serpentine has a 12.50 burger described in a review as being just a thin patty of beef on a buttered, griddled bun.  The review goes on to say “you could make a burger like this at home if you wanted but eating one at Serpentine’s bar makes you feel like a real local.”  Seriously?  If I want that local feeling in The City I’ll just go to a dive bar and get an Old Crow on the rocks for 3 bucks.

                Absinthe’s 12.50 burger includes additions of “fatty trim.”  Whadyamean additions of fatty trim?  Fatty trim is supposed to be part of a burger’s genetic code.  Does their chocolate cake come with “additions of chocolate?”  Along with “fatty trim,” the Absinthe burger comes with onion, lettuce and a (one) pickle.  For 1.50 each you can get mushrooms, cheese, caramelized onions, heirloom tomatoes and a fried egg (Absinthe is leaving some money on the table.  Keller is getting a buck ninety-five for his eggs).  The fries are hand cut and run 6 bucks.  That kind of money for a burger and fries might just compel me to get a triple shot of the restaurant’s namesake.    

You may have noticed a common thread here that those kinds of prices would me drive me to drink.  Is it because I’m a tightfisted old bastard?   Well sure that goes without saying but I have a hard time swallowing an overpriced Hamburg steak without some alcoholic pain relief.  But beyond that I can get a much better burger in nearby Pinole for the price of Absinthe’s hoity-toity hand cut fries at a little hole in the wall called The Red Onion.  

The Red Onion is just an old fashioned little burger joint that offers burger joint food at burger joint prices.  I suppose Johnny Yee doesn’t extort his customers because not only does he serve an honest burger, he’s just a greasy spoon owner who doesn’t have his name on the Food Network marquee and his location, literally in the shadow of the Pinole Valley High School stadium light standards, is a gold mine in itself.  Let’s consider his bacon cheeseburger; a 1/3 pound patty with a quarter pound of bacon, lettuce, grilled onions, tomato and their house dressing.  It costs a mere 9 cents more than those hand cut fries from Absinthe.  You get it to take out and by the time you’re home the grease is oozing through the side of the bag and if that sounds revolting then you don’t understand that the secret of a good burger is fat.  Without it all you have is a disc of sawdust.  Ah but do you want the dining experience (there’s that term again) of feeling like a local?  Then eat at the counter.  No it won’t be the same as eating the stuck-up-burger at a pretentious bar with a banker on your left and some trendy douchebag in a suit on your right, but it will be a dining experience (there’s that term yet again) that harkens back to when a burger was a damn burger.  You can’t have a martini but a nice thick chocolate malt isn’t a bad substitute.  And what better atmosphere to savor a good burger than sitting at the counter of a little joint, watching the fry cooks work their flattop magic and  listening to the sizzle of several patties and pounds of bacon while the crew, a few old timers and kids from PVHS share some banter.   

And so today I went out to The Red Onion and ordered a double cheeseburger with a side of onion rings.  Mind you this was strictly in the interest of honest reportage.  My wife asked me to pick her up a regular hamburger.  By the time I drove home I was literally slavering from that smell of beef, onions and grease.  I removed the soaked wrapping to find the burger as it’s supposed to be, two patties of medium rare beef on a plain bun oozing orange American cheese with grilled onions spilling from the edges.  It was big and messy and unpretentiously American and it was simply called a double cheeseburger.  And it was better than The Chef Ima Bigshot Bombast Burger with ridiculous extras like Sonoma blue cheese, French goose liver, olive tapenade, poached quail eggs and fried froufrou.  And did I mention that my two burgers with onion rings came to total of 12.50? 

You might ask if I've ever had a designer burger and  I’m glad you asked me that question.  Yes I have and on more than a few occasions.  They were good but they weren’t memorable.  They aren’t the kind of burger that you just gotta have when you need a burger fix.  They don’t inspire a pilgrimage.

I doubt that the trendiness of the designer hamburger is going away.  Americans are too hooked on the notion that if it has pretention and it costs more than it should it must be good.  But that’s alright.  This is America and in America choice is, well, the American way.  And I’m confident that since the good old fashioned burger has been around since the turn of the 20^th century it will be around long enough for me to keep getting it the way it was meant to be until the day my arteries are as solid as concrete.