[Pigging by Wilfrid: January 14, 2009]
Michael Huynh caught a breath between launching bánh mì and noodle joints up and down town and opened a burger bar on the Lower East Side.
Or kind of half-opened, anyway. The shutters went up before the holidays, but when I dropped by recently it still seemed not quite ready for prime time.
Now, of course, I could have just hit it at one of those moments. That it was almost empty mid-evening at the busiest end of the week is not a great sign. That it's credit card machine seemed unresponsive may have been a momentary problem, although the difficulty making change from the register didn't help matters.
But when the restroom door handle is made of tissue paper, and the entrance has a concealed step - a lawsuit waiting to happen - I begin to wonder whether the owner(s) has focussed a consistent, laser-like beam of attention on the venture.
More importantly, the menu. Short. At least, short as far as burgers are concerned - hot dogs and shakes and stuff are mentioned in passing. There's the Mikey's Burger, which features corned beef hash (as a topping pressed into it rather than, as some will tell you, part of the blend). There's a lamb "satay" burger. There is a regular cheeseburger.
Since I relish the sweet-boozy flavor of Chinese wind-dried meats, I ordered the Chinese "BLT".
Digression. Watching the griddle cook selected a ball of seasoned beef from a tray and press it on the griddle, it occurred to me that the ubiquitous chatter about "smashed" burgers which has plagued us this season may incorporate a misunderstanding. New York magazine, for example, recently referred to Shake Shack as the home of the smashed burger. Anyone would think smashed burgers were everywhere. No. Taking a globe of ground meat and pressing it flat on the grill, far from representing a smashed burger, is actually just the way burgers are prepared from the raw ingredients. If more of our breathless chow pundits had ever cooked a burger, they'd know this. The way to turn rough ground meat into a patty is to roll it into a ball and press. A true smashed burger, as I understand it, is a patty which is repeatedly beaten into the griddle as it cooks, causing the the flavor and texture of caramelization to permeate the interior as well as the exterior of the meat. I think Bill's Bar and Burger offers the real thing, which is inevitably very flat and crusty.
The Mikey patty is a small but chubby thing, along the lines of the Shake Shack/In-And-Out fast food model served on a potato roll. As for the BLT, there is no novelty in finding lettuce and tomato in the sandwich. The excitement lies solely in the Chinese bacon, and although it was there and I could taste it, I couldn't taste it very much. This was only a couple of degrees away from being a quite anonymous burger - nothing wrong with it, but nothing I couldn't make as fast at home. In a kind of worst-of-both-worlds moment, I heard a customer asking if the place could make him just an ordinary burger. An ordinary burger is pretty much what I'd just eaten.
If the restroom and credit card machine need attention, so do the fries. Way too thin and stringy, the effect is closer to eating warm potato chips. Not good. Burger, fries, coke (no sign of any booze) - around eight bucks.
