-Caveat Lector- http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,879622,00.html Food Silly burgers
Last week a burger war broke out in New York, with two restaurants battling it out to make the most expensive. Oliver Burkeman samples the winner - a $50 hunk of beef with a nugget of foie gras embedded within - and wonders if this craze for overpriced food will last Oliver Burkeman Wednesday January 22, 2003 The Guardian If there was ever a time when it would not have been preposterous and even vaguely obscene for a New York restaurant to introduce the world's most expensive hamburger, priced at $50 (£32), now is not that time. Stocks are down; the internet boom is a memory; the city is in debt; war is on the horizon. This is not the era of Gordon Gekko and Wall Street. It is the era of the dollar menu at McDonald's. But New York food fads obey no known economic laws, and DB Bistro Moderne, the restaurant owned by French-American chef Daniel Boulud on West 44th Street in midtown Manhattan, exists in a parallel universe where the Dow is always high. The four jowly businessmen at the table next to ours spoke of strip clubs, high-end restaurants, and the new Lexus SUV. The waiter took us through the specials, lingering on a mouthwatering dish involving merguez sausages, but pretty much everyone eating was there for the same reason. "I think we've already decided," I said, a bit apologetically. "Two burgers," he said. It wasn't a question. The Manhattan burger frenzy began last week, when the Old Homestead, a renowned steakhouse in the Meatpacking District, broke with decades of tradition and put its first hamburger on the menu. It costs $41 and is made from Japanese Kobe beef. Kobe cows are massaged daily, causing the fat to mingle with the meat, and resulting in a burger of unsurpassed tenderness. They also drink beer. Beer and massages: it is not clear that any philosopher ever defined the good life more accurately than this. Apart from the getting killed part, obviously. But the Old Homestead's moment came to an end when news of Boulud's rival started to circulate. The DB Burger Royale is heartstopping, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word: a fresh-baked, toasted Parmesan-and-poppy-seed bun encasing three inches of beef and short ribs braised in red wine, with a nugget of foie gras embedded within. Either side, along with the tomato confit, chicory and fresh horseradish, is a sliver of black Périgord truffle - which, at $350 per pound, accounts for much of the price. The resident chef at DB Bistro Moderne, Jean-François Bruel, is putting a brave face on the burger explosion, said Georgette Farkas, Boulud's marketing director. "He's an award-winning chef in his own right, so I think he was just a very little bit frustrated - he would love people to try the other things he does. But the Frenchmen who are successful in America are the ones who embrace the best of what is American and what is French and combine it." Ironically, Farkas said, it was Jose Bove, sworn enemy of the fast-food burger, who inspired Boulud's first adventure into the archetypal American meal. His original $29 burger happened, she said, "because Daniel was asked in an interview what he made of the unfortunate attacks against McDonald's in France. He said, 'The French are just jealous that they didn't invent the hamburger themselves.' " That gave him an idea. "He decided he would make his own version. It's not a typical American burger, not at all - it's equal parts French and American." Indeed, there are those who have argued that Boulud's creation is not really a hamburger at all - though it has been spared a judgment such as the one that Ed Levine, author of the city food shopping bible New York Eats, delivered on the Old Homestead burger in the New York Times. "It is genuinely lousy," he wrote, "a mushy, gray thing of loose consistency and little flavour." But Manhattan's passing culinary frenzies have rarely been about strict definitions, or even the quality of the food. The compact geography of the place, its residents' relative wealth, and its diners' reliance on a tiny handful of opinion-forming publications, combine to create fads that electrify the city for a day, or a week, and then vanish as fast as they arrived. Just last year, gastronomes scoured Chinatown for tubs containing illegal snakehead fish, the terrifying but allegedly tasty monsters capable of crawling out of rivers and slithering over land, surviving outside the water for up to three days. Vendors started charging even to photograph them. And price is just another selling-point. You can't buy publicity like that received by the French chef Alain Ducasse when he opened his restaurant of the same name in New York in 1999. Rumours of dinners for two costing $600 attracted the city's newspapers, and with a prix- fixe menu costing upwards of $160, plus wines weighing in at $100 and more, with after-dinner coffee at $8, the rumours turned out to be true. Customers flocked. They are paying for the quality, to be sure - but they are also paying for the price. In this, the DB Burger Royale is no different. What was it like? Delicious, obviously. Very juicy, pleasingly soft but still chewable, the truffle and beef flavours offsetting each other intriguingly, though it is never nice to think too hard about foie gras. But the next afternoon, I was on a trip in the woods, in sub-zero temperatures, when we stopped, freezing and famished, at a cheap smalltown diner for a cheeseburger and fries. The meat was nothing special, the cheese processed; the whole thing cost about seven dollars. It was the best food I'd eaten in months. I don't think I should ever be a restaurant critic. 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