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I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

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Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#261

Post by MRD85 »

nightfly wrote: post #130
hinkley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago I worked at a place downtown that was blocks away from a Thai restaurant that had a line out the door every day. The place was frenetic, like a zoo. The staff in the kitchen were running around like maniacs, making food as fast as they possibly could. The pictures on the menu above the register were all faded with age. The food was merely okay. The story was that it was cheap and decent, not good. But as I…

$2 a plate can be enough to price it out of being a reasonable regular option for people. A food cart in a pod near my work moved into a just-as-close physical restaurant and raised their prices by about $2 plate and I went from eating there once every week or two, to maybe once a year.

In a similar vein we have a lot of bakeries here run by a local Vietnamese population. They do these amazing pork rolls for $5, which is very cheap for food in Australia (A big Mac meal is around $12 for perspective). They are popular because of the price and if they were $7 they would sell far far less.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#262

Post by icebraining »

yesenadam wrote: post #225
skrebbel wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuance on HN?! Where else‽

OMG an interrobang, my eyes can hardly believe it. Haha. I love the idea (I constantly use '?!' in online chat) but they don't look so great. Also, in chess, !? and ?! have different meanings..

¿¡

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#263

Post by starshadowx2 »

willyt wrote: post #77
craftyguy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others in this thread have suggested that the restaurant give locals a 'locals card', which would allow them to purchase food at a more reasonable price.

Burger pass. $30 for a burger pass. Gets you burgers for $4 for the rest of the year. or pay $20 for a burger now. You can secretly give out burger passes to locals when the tourists aren't looking.

This sounds like a super good idea to me, I really love it. Seems pretty simple but just makes a lot of sense.

Any person travelling just coming by for the "best burger" probably would not want to spend $34 and not use that card anymore so $20 sounds great. Any regular would probably be super cool with paying that extra $30 knowing they can get a burger once a week or whatever for $4. This works out for the restaurant and the regulars, and like you said they can just hand out those cards to anyone for any reason.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#264

Post by 121789 »

bedhead wrote: post #242
tptacek wrote: post #135

It's hard to blame Kevin Alexander for this, because Steve Stanich played ball with the review, like most restaurants would. If he wanted to, he could have asked not to be featured in the list, and Alexander probably would have complied; otherwise, he could have done other things to make it clear to his customers that he wasn't interested in fulfilling the role the ranking carved out for him. We see this effect in Ch…

Au Cheval is easily the most overrated burger (and perhaps restaurant) in Chicago. Hey guess what, if you make a 12oz burger, put three slices of cheese on it, place it on a buttered roll, then put pork belly, a fried egg, and mayo on it, it will taste good. And it will also make you want to freakin die the moment you're done because you just consumed 25,000 calories. But people will wait literally 2.5 hours for this…

I completely disagree with your opinion, but to each their own. Also, people are comfortable with the 2.5 hour wait (or more!) because they can just go hang in one of the many bars in the area during that time.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#265

Post by foobarchu »

pj_mukh wrote: post #36

Sorry, my engineering my mind craves a solution. Wouldn't forcing people into an asynchronous online/mobile queue be the best solution? You can favour verified locals if you want there, control exactly how many orders you take in, and nip any potential disappointments (leading to bad Yelp reviews) right in the bud. I've trekked to enough "Best in " places and been the "outsider" grumbling waiting outside in a giant l…

I feel like the problem there is that it would require expending a lot of effort to solve what will probably be a temporary problem. That kind of system isn't going to be cheap, and the high traffic will only last as long as the list in question is popular. As soon as another 'best burger place' comes along, all that traffic is probably going to die down, and now you're a small diner left with this complex expensive system.

It reminds me a lot of the dilemma facing graphics card makers recently, wherein the cards keep getting bought up by cryptocurrency miners. If they raise prices, they're pricing out of the regular customers who will stick around after the cryptocurrency mining dies down, and if they raise their production capacity too much then they will be left with massive overcapacity with things die down.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#266

Post by 121789 »

tptacek wrote: post #181
monksy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Small Chauval (too expensive for what you get), and I'm not going to wait 2-3hrs for a burger.

Honestly I'm not sure I'm sold on any destination burger. Google Kenji Alt's ultra-smash burger, and just make them at home. I'm unhappy about Au Cheval because the rest of the menu is relevant to my interests, but I can't eat there because it's a destination burger restaurant now. But, back to the point of this article: my problems != Hogsalt Restaurants problems!

Oh please, the Au Cheval wait has been ridiculous for at least 5 years now. If you have friends and you drink, it’s very easy to plan to hang at one of the bars that’re close by for a couple of hours.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#267

Post by ddingus »

ddingus wrote: post #11

:D I would visit this place a couple times per year. It was a place you took someone to for a special time. And when done that way, as it was done for me (Thanks Joe P), the need to respect that seems obvious, built right in. With life being how it is sometimes, it has been a while. Damn. This story makes me sad.

What's the deal? Don't you guys have little secrets around town that you kind of want to respect, have a little bit of culture around?

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#268

Post by tptacek »

bedhead wrote: post #256
tptacek wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grant Achatz is famously a fiend for Potbelly (a cheap chain that is like a notch up from Quiznos). I don't know that it's fair to ding him with Au Cheval. I hear good things about the rest of Au Cheval's menu!

Yeah, would be nice to try it but the wait make Hot Doug's look brief.

I once waited in line at Hot Doug's and when I reached the front, a dude in a limo pulled up and offered to buy my place in line for $100. I didn't take him up on it, but one of the dudes I was there with did!

It turns out though that there was a secret to Hot Doug's, which is that you could just fax an order in and then skip the line to pick it up. I always worried that the line would murder me when I did that.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#269

Post by kyledrake »

I'm a local. I've eaten a burger at Stanich's, way before any of this happened (apparently? I'm just now learning about it). It was fine, but calling it the best burger in America is extremely overselling it. Oregon has a law that you need to serve some kind of food if you sell hard liquor, and that's pretty much what their burgers felt like, an afterthought to fill OLCC regulations.

It was a place for old dudes to get a Budweiser and watch the basketball game, which perhaps made it one of the more authentic places in town (if that's all it takes, I know dozens of places in Minnesota you'll love), but definitely not the best place to get a burger.

If you want a much, much better burger in Portland, go to the Super Deluxe, or go to Yakuza and order theirs, or even Killer Burger, or really just about any other place. Portland is an extremely competitive food town that regularly has burger competitions (http://www.portlandburgerweek.com/), and there are dozens if not hundreds of places where you can get a burger that will be better.

I understand that the article isn't necessarily about this, but I'm having trouble walking away from what I know from direct experience is a ridiculous decision. To give a perspective on how ridiculous this is to me, if I was asked to name just Portland's 50 best burger places, I'm not sure Stanich's would be on it. It's not negligent because he unleashed the internet hordes on this place, it's negligent because the burgers there just weren't very good.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#270

Post by scruple »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #249
scruple wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been to Sukiyabashi Jiro, in Tokyo, four times. The Ginza location twice and the Roppongi Hills location twice. Lunch and dinner service at both locations. These are Michelin 3 and 2 star restaurants, respectively, and it is actually quite challenging to get in to the Ginza location as a foreigner, especially the dinner service. I don't mean to say anything to discredit Jiro or his sons or their apprentices. The…

If it's just as good for cheaper, then why have you been 4 times? It doesn't sound like it's easier.

> If it's just as good for cheaper, then why have you been 4 times?

Because the lunch and dinner services are different. Because we later vacationed in Japan with a couple that we are friends with and they wanted to go and were more comfortable going with us (both of these places are an intense experience, to put it mildly, though one is a more comfortable atmosphere than the other). Because of that intense experience and the atmosphere that it provides.

Because it's more difficult still to comfortably navigate those smaller towns and regions, outside of Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto, etc..., without any sort of handle on the language. That alone implies a few things. You or someone you're traveling with knows the language well enough to navigate those smaller towns and regions and that it's very likely not your first or even second trip to the country.

We didn't come to understand that sushi in a place like Shimoda could be better than what you'd find at a Michelin rated sushi restaurant until we were able to find ourselves in Shimoda having that sushi and we weren't comfortable even going to a place like Shimoda until our third trip to Japan.

edit/ Because my wife and I are just as vulnerable as everyone else that is being talked about here for falling prey to "top 10 lists" and the like.

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