Can 12 Perfect Burgers Still Draw a Huge Crowd?
Over the summer, the chef Mike Bagale introduced a new burger at the 19-month-old Sip & Guzzle, and he was clear with the staff about his goal: “I wanted to create a line outside again.” Bagale’s plan has worked. At approximately 3:30 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, people started queuing up on Sip & Guzzle’s sidewalk, nearly all of them waiting for a Tavern Burger, a patty of high-grade Japanese beef seared in tallow and French butter, topped with black-pepper sauce, smoked aïoli, pepper relish, and a square of Parmesan cut to evoke a Kraft Single. “We serve 12 a night because it came from necessity,” says Bagale, explaining that the patties are ground from the trim of Miyazaki A5 Wagyu that’s used in Sip & Guzzle’s $150 steak sandwich. The Tavern Burger is $35. “It’s only a gimmick if the quality of the product is not delivering,” Bagale says.
Although notable burgers are scattered across New York’s restaurant history (Minetta Tavern’s Black Label burger is a frequent reference point), it was Raoul’s that pioneered this restricted template with its bar-only Burger Au Poivre more than a decade ago. “We were just making 12 because there are a dozen buns in a pack and we didn’t think we needed more,” says Karim Raoul. Once the late food writer Josh Ozersky deemed it the best burger in America, Raoul’s calculus changed, but only slightly: “After the lines started forming, we said, ‘Let’s just limit it to this or we’ll become a burger restaurant.’”
Of course, the only thing New Yorkers want more than something delicious is something delicious that they can’t have. This is doubly true if the thing they can’t have is not even listed on a menu. So it makes sense that a handful of new restaurants have recently introduced their own elusive, quantity-restricted burgers, or kept them off menus completely and held them back for customers who know to ask. If these burgers have a unifying theme beyond rules — limited-offering burgers cannot be modified; when they’re gone, they’re gone — it’s a focus on using complicated technique to create a familiar package with a bent toward decadence that would impress even a chef of Daniel Boulud’s standing.
In fact, Boulud — whose luxury “DB” burger once bewitched this city — is trying his hand at the trend, too. At his Le Gratin, an after–9 p.m.–only Truffle Burger comes with a slab of fried pork belly and a blanket of shaved black truffle. And he’s debating a return for the DB burger in some form or another, even though the original restaurant that offered it has closed. “People all the time tell me, ‘You used to have a restaurant, and every time I would go there, I’d have the burger with the truffles,’’’ Boulud says. (The DB Burger’s signature indulgence was that it was stuffed with short rib and foie gras, but guests were also given the opportunity to add two layers of Périgord truffles, or to make it “Super Royale” with four layers of truffles; truffles are a recurrent theme in the Boulud Gastronomic Universe.) “I think I’m going to start it again. You can just maybe tease it and say, ‘Daniel will be starting a limited edition sometime in the fall.’” Now he just needs to figure out which of his restaurants would make sense as a new home. “It’s a lot of work,” he says, “and I don’t know which chef would want to take it.”
The limited-edition burger occupies a strange, paradoxical place in the world of restaurant service. It is at once a concession to a base American hunger while also being intentionally, maddeningly withholding, a subversion of the rules of hospitality. “You want it to be the thing that people want to come for, but you also don’t want it to be the only thing people come for,” says Melissa Rodriguez, whose bar-exclusive burger
at Crane Club is made with dry-aged prime beef, white cheddar, and smoky tomato compote. “So having to work for it a little bit is not the worst idea in the world.”
Angie Mar has frequently opined, in her Instagram Stories and in the press, that to dine at her restaurant Le B. only for Le Burger — dry-aged beef topped with caramelized onions and fromager d’Affinois listed at “market price” with a $25 deposit required to reserve — and not for its six-course $295 tasting menu undersells the talents of the kitchen. “No matter what cuisine I create, or how accomplished I am, everyone will ask me about the burger,” Mar told the New York Times.
The trick for all of the chefs is to embrace the buzz that a great burger creates while limiting what Raoul calls the “damage” that can be caused when burger mania runs unchecked inside a restaurant. Scarcity — manufactured or otherwise — is the key to making the balance work. “I don’t really feel like a burger makes sense for my dining room,” says Rodriguez. “It’s a lot more casual than what the rest of the dining room has to offer from a menu perspective.” And, she notes, “a burger can kill your check average.”
Related