Mikey’s Burger
Hamburgers
Manhattan : Lower East Side : Ludlow & Rivington

Before I get into Mikey’s Burger in the Lower East Side, a brief aside about my old friend 4Food. A while ago, a coworker and I decided to get some lunch. I asked him if he had been to 4Food, and as he had not (strange, since it’s literally across the street), we stopped in. I explained 4Food’s crazy gimmicks – the burger-building system, the “Buildboard” Chart, et. al. – and ordered one of my own creations (the “Salad Days”) while he discussed various options with the girl behind the register.

When we got our burgers he explained he told the girl he wanted to make “a Puerto Rican burger” only to have her tell her they already had one. I asked what it was called, because I myself had just created a burger called “El Puertorriqueño” a few days before. She had suggested El Puertorriqueño.

This was very funny to us both, that he had inadvertently ordered one of my own burgers (and given me some kick-back in the process). We went back to the office and told another coworker the story, and he was instantly intrigued about 4Food, especially when I told him I occasionally made enough money to get a free burger.

He immediately set to work creating a burger that would sell enough so that he would be getting “at least a free burger every week.” That burger, designed specifically not to taste the best or be the most interesting but merely to push the most units possible, was the “Midtown Cheddar Bacon,” a burger he gave the tagline “All business, all delicious.”

After a couple of weeks of build-up, the Midtown Cheddar Bacon quickly overcame the perennial Buildboard topper, the “Better Turkey Burger,” and has sat at the top of the list ever since. Not content with that, he then made another burger called “The Manchego Avocado,” which is currently number two on the list, and has been for some time.

In case you were wondering (in case there was any doubt), this coworker is in sales. Suffice it to say, he’s getting more free burgers than he can handle.

Anyway, my evil genius coworker aside, let’s talk about a different burger joint. This one is way down in the Lower East Side. It’s a small, old-school looking burger bar called Mikey’s. I was drawn to it both because of the retro look and its slightly oriental burgers, including the BLT Burger, which includes “Chinese bacon, kewpie mayo, lettuce and tomato.”

Sounds interesting, right? Unfortunately, “Chinese bacon” didn’t seem any different to me than regular old American bacon, and “Kewpie mayo,” while coming in a Japanese-looking bottle, tasted not dissimilar from Hellmann’s.

I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed, and though the burger was passable, as far as plain old American burgers go, it certainly wasn’t anything to get excited about. I also got fries, which were also fine, but also nothing amazing. Mikey’s biggest draw seems to be its retro look rather than the food itself. If that’s enough for you, have at it, although I think there’s enough better food to be had in the LES to really bother.

LT Burger
Hamburgers
Manhattan : Midtown : 40th St. & 5th Ave.

LT Burger, which, as far as I can tell, is not pronounced “Lieutenant Burger,” although it should be, is a brand new burger joint that opened up a week or so ago right across the street from Bryant Park on 40th. You know, I never used to eat burgers in Michigan. I always found them to be an incredibly boring meal, but New York’s burger joints have such variety and (typically) qaulity, I actually got genuinely excited when LT Burger finally opened its doors.

(Perhaps important to note: Of the seven entries in the venerated Five Taco column, two are hamburger places.)

When I finally stopped in LT, after weeks of waiting for it to open, I was a little dismayed by how expensive these burgers are. A “Standard” burger is nine dollars. Nine! And it grows from there, all the way up to the American Kobe, which is $16, or about $10 more than a typical burger in the city.

Their shakes, by the way, though they sound very good, are between six and eight. Remember when Vincent Vega was astounded by the price of a Five Dollar Milkshake? This is truly a brave new world.

Anyway, I went with the Mexican burger which, at $11, was actually on the cheap side. It also sounded the best, coming, as it did, with guacamole, chili and pickled jalapeño. For the price alone, this burger had an uphill battle to win me over, but against my best intentions to be disappointed, I have to say, this burger was pretty amazing. It is, in fact, probably worth the steep cost of entry.

The burger itself was very nice, the guacamole was overflowing on the bun, and it also included little corn chips, like tiny Fritos, which were delicious and added an appealing crunch. I don’t think I can really justify eating here often, close as it is to me, but perhaps on special occasions it’d be worth returning. Lieutenant Burger makes a mean patty.

4food
Hamburgers
Manhattan : Midtown : Madison & 40th

My favorite Midtown lunch place is conveniently located across the street from my office. And you can’t really ask for much more than that. It’s called 4food and it’s a burger joint, but one unlike any other I’ve ever seen before, or really any other restaurant I’ve ever seen before full stop.

4food’s tagline is “De-junking Fast Food,” and it’s a mission statement they go about accomplishing by reimagining the hamburger entirely. Their biggest gimmick — in a place full of them — is allowing you to create a burger either online or in an app on one of the many iPads found throughout the store. I just make the burger in the office, give the order a few minutes than walk down and pick it up. It saves me from having to wait for food during my lunch hour, plus I just think it’s neat in a kind of Verhoeven-esque way.

Using their Build-a-Burger interface, you choose literally every aspect of your sandwich, and the options extend far past simply American or Cheddar. First you pick a bun from either brioche, multigrain, rice or pumpernickel. According to the 4food newsletter (yeah, I subscribe), they’ll also be introducing a pretzel roll this autumn.

Then you move on to the filling, which ranges from the standard ground beef to lamb to veggie to wild salmon. And here’s another gimmick: the patties aren’t circular, they’re O-shaped, with a hole in the middle to be filled with your third option: the “Scoop.”

These scoops can be just about anything. Apple stuffing, macaroni and cheese, mofongo and many other options abound. And then! You can even add a slice of something else on top of that! For example: Avocado, caramelized apple, kim chi, et. al.

The cheeses on hand range from my personal favorite, goat, to manchego, bleu, fontina and others. There’s also a staggering amount of condiments, going well beyond ketchup and mustard to include chutney, cranberry sauce and tzatziki. Finally, you can also choose to add any of the standard burger toppings of lettuce, tomatoes and pickles.

And here’s the third gimmick: Once you’ve made your creation, you’re also given the option to save and name the burger you just designed, and it’ll be featured on the 4food website where future customers can choose to order it, giving you a little kickback to spend on future orders. Personally, designing the burgers seems like the most fun part, so I don’t understand why people are choosing pre-made creations. But I’m glad they do, because it’s fun to keep track of how well your burgers are doing and when they’re “trending.”

Mine do fairly well, incidentally, and I’ve gotten the “trending” status on the homepage (and the money from those sales) a couple of times. As I write this, in fact, my burger “The Salad Days” is number eight on the “Buildboard Chart.” Eight! Out of all the burgers made at 4food! That’s nothing to sneeze at.

And because you can share the burgers you’ve made, you can see exactly what I’ve eaten at 4food for yourself. The aforementioned “Salad Days” has a beef patty with avocado and chili mango in the center, pancetta bacon on top and cranberry sauce. My “Caribbean Burger” is made of lamb with potato chorizo, sweet plantains and bleu cheese. My favorite, though, might be “The Apples to Apples:” beef with herb and apple stuffing, caramelized onion slice, goat cheese and ginger mango chutney to top it all off.

One final gimmick are the sides and drinks. You won’t find french fries here — they’re simply not on the menu. Instead, you can choose to get your burger with coconut rice, roasted potatoes or salad. There are some house-made sodas, but most of the drinks fall in the tea or smoothie categories.

Of course, none of these hooks would mean anything unless the food was good in the first place. But by now you can probably ascertain that, for all the inventive flourishes and innovative marketing, 4food is also serious about food. Their burgers clearly lack the zen-like simplicity of Shake Shack, but they make up for it with an enormous amount of ingredients and the ability to let you choose precisely which of those ingredients you want to take advantage of.

I have some quibbles. I love the scoop you can add to the burgers but am not particularly crazy that they come at the expense of the center of the burger patty. Though I really liked the coconut rice, I similarly wish it wasn’t mutually exclusive to french fries, which I unabashedly love. And while the burgers are, I believe, very reasonably priced (about seven to eight dollars for one of my stacked burgers), it’s the sides and drinks that seem to gouge you. Three dollars would be perfectly reasonable for coconut rice if you got more than a few forkfuls of it. In my search for a french fry replacement, I’ve also tried the apple cobbler, which is good but not great, and a peanut butter and chocolate smoothie, which was way too vitaminy to really count as a dessert.

So when I have a french fry craving, I have to go to Black Shack down the street, but for burgers, 4food is among the best. I, of course, adore the weird technological and social aspects of it, but I also just think the food itself is fantastic. And you can’t really ask for much more than that.

Black Shack
Hamburgers
Manhattan : Murray Hill : Lexington & 38th

The name seems to imply it’s an anti-Shake Shack, but Black Shack is quite similar. Like my favorite burger in the world, Black Shack sells tasty, unpretentious burgers, shakes and fries.

It differs in that it dresses up these burgers more than Shake Shack would ever allow, as well as the fact that they also sell chicken, tofu and mozzarella sandwiches and salads. I ordered the Western Chicken, with crispy onions, pickles and barbecue sauce, so this isn’t a straight burger-to-burger comparison, but let’s see how they stack up anyways.

Black Shack makes a good chicken sandwich — the crispy onions, in particular, are quite nice. The cheese options are pretty limited (only cheddar or American, which is to say the two least interesting cheeses you can possibly muster up) but the fries were thin and crispy, which I prefer to Shake Shack’s thick crinkle-cuts.

Unsurprisingly, however, the chicken just doesn’t come close to Shake Shack’s mouth-watering burger. As I’ve said, it’s not a really fair comparison as I’m pitting two completely different dishes against each other. Maybe I’ll return to Black Shack and give it a genuine shot at dethroning the world champion, but it’d be surprised if it really did. Shake Shack is pretty unparalleled. It’s possible, I suppose, but it’d be quite an upset.

Zaitzeff
Hamburgers
Manhattan : Financial District : Nassau & John

I realized one of my New York dreams yesterday, attending a concert by one of my all time favorite musicians, composer Philip Glass. As part of the River to River Festival, the Philip Glass Ensemble played a free show in Rockefeller Park, the northern most tip of Battery Park City.

Glass, who unbelievably turned 75 this year, brought out all the hits — or at least played a wide selection of his inimitable catalogue. Opening with one of his best minimalist pieces, “The Civil Wars: Part II” from the early ’80s, he also worked through some of his earliest material from the late ’60s all the way up to premiering a new piece of music called “Spaceship,” part of a larger piece that will premier in full tonight.

He even brought Music in Twelve Part into the action, although it unfortunately wasn’t the original “Part One” he decided to play. That composition may be my single favorite piece of music ever — it’s not much of a song, but it’s sort of my favorite song. You can’t have everything, though, and Glass went with “Part Eight” — not my favorite of the bunch by a long shot, although it was kind of amazing to see a group of people perform such an acrobatic piece live. I’m still not really sure how they do it.

The show was plagued with all the problems any free outdoor show faces — an occasionally restless audience, technical difficulties, a not entirely loud enough sound system, people bringing little kids to a Philip Glass show (and then trying to explain Philip Glass to their six year old while other people are trying to listen to the music; why did this happen?) — but the show was pretty fun and Rockefeller park, with the Hudson behind us and the Empire State building peaking out from the skyline in front, turned out to be a really beautiful place to stage a concert, especially in the twilight hours.

Now that I can scratch that off my bucket list, I should also mention that before I headed to Battery Park, I stopped in Zaitzeff in the Financial District to grab a late lunch/early dinner. Zaitzeff is primarily a burger joint, but I ordered a BLTA, a bacon, lettuce, tomato and avocado sandwich.

Honestly, I was a little surprised by what arrived. I already thought $8.50 was a bit steep for a BLTA, but I figured the sandwich would at least be large or long. Instead, it was pretty tiny, necessitated by the small, english muffin-like bun it came on. The burgers come on the same thing, and it’s definitely nice, although it does ensure anything sandwiched inside won’t be too large.

That said, everything in the BLTA was very good. The bacon was crisp and hot, the lettuce was bright green romaine, the tomato was fresh and the avocado, crucially, was ripe and delicious as well. I’m still not sure it was really worth what I paid for it, and I ended up making another meal for myself after I walked back home, but it was a good sandwich, I can’t deny that.

Phil Glass, though. Oh, man. Is there a singe more talented person in the world? Rhetorical question: no, there is not. Seventy five and still killing it! I hope he never stops.