NYC Burger Tour! The Planning.

What kind of madman creates a walking tour of NYC based on hamburgers?

Whenever I read articles that talk about "The Best * in NYC" It's usually a list of someone's top 10 places or so that are worth looking in to. For most specific foods, this list gets its entries repeated several times over. For example, ramen will commonly list recent mainstays such as Setagaya and Minca, giving mention to Menkui-Tei, Menchako-Tei, Sapporo, and a few others. BBQ will commonly include Daisy Mae's and Dinosaur. Cupcakes always pulls up Magnolia and Buttercup. 

Burgers are no exception. Shake Shack and Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridien tend to dominate lists. However, the burger is a much more ubiquitous beast as compared to foods like ramen or cupcakes. Every place that does meat does a burger of some sort. Every diner, steakhouse, pub will have a burger, to greater or lesser effect. Even within thta realm, the hamburger is a varied creature. Just as we can theoretically generate taxonomy for bread bag clips, we can do much the same for the hamburger. We have grilled burgers, pub burgers, diner burgers, fast food burgers, sliders, stuffed burgers--the hamburger is a varied creature whose diversity lends itself to divergences in opinion that we cannot commonly find among food.

In this vein, the burger also lends itself to a sort of extreme difficulty when it comes to sampling them. The bulk of restaurant burgers tend to be 8-10 ounces of anywhere between 10-30% non-meat (presumably beef fat) content. This is a mighty, mighty thing for people to eat en masse. At least with ramen, it's mostly carbs, and broth is a purely optional venture (as was the case with me in Menchako-Tei). Burgers are often served as a platter, and to condemn fries to reheating in an oven is something of a sin (especially if they're fresh-cut and fresh fried). It basically lends itself to a short trip downtown to 5 or so places before a sort of gastronomic wall erects itself and/or we're stuck with 2-5 bags of fries, dying their slow painful death of The Sogginess.

Now, 6 places isn't particularly minor in any real way, but in a landscape as varied as the hamburger, I feel it sells the tour short. My mad vision was to hit 10 places over about 7-8 hours and get a real sampling of several types of burger from several places in NYC. Unfortunately, I had mentioned this offhand to too many of my friends to be able to keep such and ambitious itinerary. As it is, the current party consists of 9 people:

Me, J, Ch, SDS +1, S, EGC, B, M., and F. 

It will be a 6 stop tour, starting at 39th, meandering around toward NYU, conveniently enough ina  pub, hopefully to end the evening well. 

City Burger (39th & B'way)

Shake Shack (23rd & Madison)

Blue 9 (13th and 3rd) 

Paul's (St Marks and 2nd)

Shopsin's (Essex St., Off Delancy)

Stoned Crow (Washington, near NYU)

Walking Path! 

The walking path is about 4.5 miles total. and it wanders around downtown a whole lot.

Anyway, wish me luck!

Edits: FU Blogger!

Vote Kiviak in '09

So, I put in an entry for Kiviak as the "Most disgusting delicacy" and it got picked as a finalist.

http://www.culinaryschools.org/blog/cat/disgusting-delicasies/

If it wins, I get 500 bucks, and for the first time ever, my esoteric knowledge of all things food-related suddenly pays for the rent.

My entry, Kiviak is probably one of the nastiest things that I could ever imagine someone having to use for sustenance. The reason behind its development is likely that in colder climates, people needed a way to preserve meat while keeping it raw. People found that eating little but cooked meat left them with a distinct nutritional deficiency (specifically Vitamin D). As such, the delicacy Kiviak came into being.

Kiviak, quite simply, is fermented auks. Because older cultures did not have the luxury of wooden barrels, they instead used disemboweled seal carcasses to store de-feathered auks. The seal carcass is rubbed with oil and sutured shut, then left to ferment underground for 2-7 months beneath a large, flat stone. The seal meat is not eaten, but instead the birds are split open and their fermented intestinal juice eaten directly or used as sauce.

It's quite hideous, I feel, but apparently, the same concept is used to create fish sauce. When it comes down to it, fermentation, be it alcohol, yogurt, cheese, or even bread, is simply controlled rotting. The primary difference is that eating a fermented food is often very healthful, while just chowing down on rotted anything will make you sick.

Anyway, being the enormous anime geek I am, I discovered this via Moyashimon, a food-science anime: 

 

Lovely.

Anyway, please vote for me if you can. My entry is listed as Kiviak. I'll get 500 dollars if I win.

http://www.culinaryschools.org/blog/cat/disgusting-delicasies/