By Daniel Moattar
Burgers are back. Granted, Californians have been going to In-N-Out Burger since time immemorial (1948, actually), and sure, they’re still eating Double-Doubles (capitalized?) like they’re going out of style, but something new is going on. ‘Low’ cuisine is picking up a little class. It’s not just the French taco cart downtown, or the deep-fried calzone on Delfina’s secret menu. California cuisine – particularly San Francisco’s – has raised the hamburger, that American staple, to a new pinnacle of meaty sophistication. The trend took off in the early nineteen-nineties, when a flood of chic burger joints – among them Bistro Burger (founded in 1993), the uninspiredly-named Burger Joint (1994), and Burgermeister (1999), all now chains – first took off.
Success came for many as a result of choosing downtown locations., Owners catered to the full wallets of Financial District workers on their lunch breaks. With over two-dozen unique establishments now in FiDi alone, and many more throughout the city, gourmet burgers are in no short supply.
But even by a gourmand’s standards, Hubert Keller is playing a wholly different game. While of no relation to star chef Thomas Keller, H.K. (I like this, but is it okay by AP Style or something?) has some serious credentials to his name. For one thing, Keller is French-born, unsurprising considering he is also the proprietor of premier French restaurant Fleur de Lys, in downtown San Francisco. The waiter told me all this. He also called him Eu-bérre in a thick and probably fake French accent, whereupon I struggled not to choke on my onion rings.
Who better to bring an epicurean touch to the humble burger? In the great American tradition of entrepreneurship (A French word. Oh, the irony.), Keller has opened a new and wildly different restaurant in Union Square called Burger Bar. Being French, he’s also put a $60 hamburger on the menu, and being French, he makes it with foie gras and truffles. But Burger Bar, which opened just last month, also has some more affordable items on its menu.
Settling into a booth at Keller’s new restaurant, which you’ll find on the sixth floor of the Union Square Macy’s, I was gripped by the fear that I’d stepped into the Cheesecake Factory by mistake. The décor was reminiscent of a poorly lit Hard Rock Café. The music, in a word, was atrocious. In nine words, “Don’t Trust Me” was playing when I walked in.
The menu offered about two-dozen add-ons for my burger. They ranged from the mundane (sliced jalapeños) to the pleasantly gourmet (blue cheese) to the frankly absurd (a grilled half-lobster, $13.). After a few minutes of soul-searching, I passed up the opportunity to have a grilled half-lobster on my burger. This, in retrospect, is probably going to be one of those regrets I carry with me for the rest of my life. I finally ordered their simplest dish, a $9.50 black angus burger. I had it rare, in an attempt to get in touch with my more primitive instincts. Given that the burger was made with top-notch meat this was probably a great call.
Apart from the sheer size and high quality of the meat itself, the hamburger was deeply unremarkable. It arrived on an enormous white plate, an oasis of burger in a porcelain desert, in the style of those nouvelle cuisine restaurants that bring you one string bean and a slice of onion artfully arranged on an giant dish, maybe with a some Béarnaise sauce. But this was a burger, so it just looked strange.
I won’t call it bad, but I’ve made better hamburgers at home. If no one had told me Keller was supposed to be one of the “Top Ten Chefs in America” – that’s according to their menu – I would never have guessed. Unless I’m also one of the top ten chefs in America, someone at Burger Bar is exaggerating. If this was New York, and ten dollars was a reasonable price to pay for a pretty good burger, I would go right back. But it’s San Francisco, and unless I wake up with a hankering for a lobster-foie gras-truffle burger, I’m sticking to the Double-Double. Animal Style. Probably with a shake.