The Prodigal Carnivore Returns to the Crescent City (Part I)

April 21st, 2008 by Scott

I’ve recently returned to my hometown, New Orleans, which has always held a special, spicy place in my heart, as it should any food lover. Since the home I grew up in drowned in Katrina — thank you bastards Army Corps of Engineers! — forcing my folks to flee to Shreveport, I’ve had little opportunity to “come home” for any decent period of time. My initial reason for the return was that I was invited to participate as an author at the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, but I think you and I both know my true motivation:

I’d come home to eat.

And oh, what a homecoming! Beginning with two dozen oysters at Acme Oyster House mere minutes after my arrival. Now, I realize that this site isn’t about seafood, but darn it all if I couldn’t share this experience with you, since I have a profound love of Louisiana oysters. I had two dozen of the biggest, plumpest, cleanest-tasking bivalves around, and all this at only nine bucks a dozen. This is why I don’t go out for oysters in New York: it pains my soul to pay fifteen dollars for six measly little nickel-sized oysters. Boo to that. I’ll do my time and wait for home, where I can get a plate looking like this:

And a closer shot:

Afterwards I had a fun time hanging out in the French Quarter and catching up with my family (saw some really brilliant antique walking sticks at this gallery on Royal St.), and then headed out for dinner. Realizing with shock and shame that I, a son of the Crescent City, had never had a Port of Call hamburger, my brother and parents were eager to rectify the situation.

I’ve expressed my feelings about hamburgers at length in the past, especially the venerable Shake Shack, but the Port of Call burger is something entirely different from my personal picture of hamburger pulchritude. First, I have to say that this restaurant is pretty much carnivore-exclusive. Other than a salad or two, your menu options are basically limited to three choices: pizza (with meat), burger or steak. And I’ve yet to encounter someone who’s ordered the steak or pizza. Meaning, of course, that the burger is sure to be something of powerful gustatory joy, which, I’ll add, is an immensely important thing to New Orleanians.

The full-on Port of Call burger is a BEAST: a humongous patty of very fresh meat cooked to perfection (it’s often noted that the beef is so tender that one doesn’t even need teeth to eat it), topped with ooey-gooey cheddar cheese and, the most important part, the restaurant’s specially marinated mushrooms. It’s a thing of monstrous beauty, which is how one could probably describe the city of New Orleans itself — joyfully gluttonous, with a uniquely charming character and history, and probably pretty dangerous, too. But hey, that’s why we love it, isn’t it?

Held up to my camera’ scrutiny, here’s a shot of a classic Port of Call burger in all it’s savory egregiousness:

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss my drink choice. PoC is known not just for the burgers, but for their signature cocktails as well. Upon asking a regular which one I should try, she enthusiastically recommended the “Red Turtle.” I ordered my beverage, a sickly sweet — which in New Orleans generally indicates stout potency, since you need a bucket of sugar to mask the staggering amount of liquor in the thing — pink concoction served in a collectible plastic cup. My father inquired about the drink.

“What’d you get?” he asked.

“A Red Turtle,” I replied.

“What’s in that?”

“Tequila, I think.”

“Okay,” he said. “What else?”

“Ummm…. red? And, quite possibly, turtles.”

“I’ll stick with beer,” said Dad.

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I Can Has Shackburger?

September 7th, 2007 by Scott

For an avid carnivore, there are myriad joys to be found in the wild world of animal flesh. It’s easy, if you’re an adventurous meat-thusiast, to go on at length about the fancy stuff: seared foie gras; roasted bone marrow; ostrich carpaccio; porterhouse steaks that have been carefully dry-aged for months; and so on. But sometimes, all you really want is a burger. Simple, right?

Well, it should be, but not all hamburgers are created equal. It’s amazing to me that the humble burger – derived, legend has it, from German sailors who discovered the joys of raw, minced beef in Portugal, then brought their find back to Hamburg where an enterprising chef formed it into patties to create the original “hamburger steak” that appeared on the menu at Delmonico’s at the turn of the 20th century as “Beefsteak a la Hamburg” – can be something so wonderful, and yet often so pitiable, even downright tragic. I speak specifically here about fast food burgers, the sad, squashed, pathetic greaseballs (whose meat, more often than not, comes from broken down old dairy cows) that make me feel so horrible after eating them that I need to lie down afterwards with gastrointestinal discomfort bordering on suicidal. It’s a miserable feeling, one that begs the question: why do I do this to myself?

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. When you’re at your wits end, wondering whether the great American hamburger is dead and gone, and you’re ready to start ordering boiled, skinless chicken on Melba toast instead, it’s worth going out of your way to find a truly splendid burger. For me, this means one thing: Shake Shack. Of course, there are dozens of excellent burgers to be found in New York City, and I have to confess that even I haven’t tried them all. That’s mostly due to the fact that once I had my first Shackburger, I was sold, and I now rarely find the desire to go anywhere else when I get that junkie itch for this great culinary symbol of U.S. cuisine. Surprisingly, the Shack has only been open for three years, and it didn’t take long for it to become a bona fide New York institution. So why the fuss? Why the hubbub? And, dear Lord, why would any reasonable person – much less a New Yorker – consent to waiting in line up to and sometimes over an hour for a burger, fries, and a shake? In my opinion, there are several critical factors to the Shack’s success:

1. The Park. Situated on the Southeast corner of Madison Square Park and surrounded by its natural beauty – an oasis in Manhattan’s concrete and steel jungle – it’s a lovely place to sit back, enjoy your lunch, and forget about all the unanswered emails and that ever-growing mountain of filing accumulating on your desk. I no longer dwell in the cubicle world (thank goodness), but when I did, my lunch in the park was the one purely soul-restoring part of the workday. I’m convinced that if more disgruntled employees were allowed to take their lunch hours in such a place, workplace shootings would drop dramatically.

2. Quality and Simplicity. Making a burger is not rocket surgery: bread, meat, cheese…lettuce and tomato, maybe onions if you want to get fancy. And yet restaurants around the country, now the globe, continue to intentionally commit high crimes against hamburgerdom. These people should be put in the stocks, for all to see and taunt and throw rotten cabbages at. It’s disgraceful. All the Shake Shack does is what it has to do: provide high-quality, fresh ingredients, and – this is the most important part – cook everything to order. They don’t rely on gimmickry, loading up the burgers with six strips of bacon or employing a patty the size of a tractor wheel. I hate it when restaurants do this, not because it’s too much meat (which it often is), but because the bun-to-beef ratio is thrown completely out of whack. The proportion of ingredients in a hamburger sandwich should be such that, on your very last bite, you still have some bread leftover to insulate that final bit of patty. Some restaurants get so crack-headedly exuberant about their Barry Bonds-sized steroid patties, they forget that the bun containing it is dismally undersized, and before you know it you’re holding a big, greasy hunk of meat in cheese and ketchup in your bare hand, and that just plain sucks. Shackburgers are not big. They’re not sliders, but certainly far from humongous, and that suits me fine, because the proportions have been thought out as though the sandwich was designed by an actual architect. And hey, for all I know, maybe it was – that wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

Then there’s quality. Here’s the difference between a Shackburger and, say, a Big Mac or a Whopper: I can eat a burger from the Shake Shack, as well as a helping of fries, and not feel like I want to commit seppuku afterwards. You know why? Fresh ingredients! It’s a slap-yourself-in-the-head no-brainer that makes you want to moan “Duh!” in your best fourth-grade inflection. Good, high-quality food, cooked when you order it, is simply not going to send you fumbling desperately for the Alka Seltzer and regretting having ever ordered a burger in the first place. In fact, every time I go to the Shake Shack, even despite the infuriating wait (standing in line for an hour while being forced to smell that intoxicating aroma of grilled meat is a Herculean test of will and patience), I make a point to thank myself.

Okay, so I’m waxing rhapsodic about the Shack. That tends to happen – it’s probably only a matter of time before Shack converts are handing out pamphlets at LaGuardia and JFK like Hare Krishnas. But if you don’t trust me, take a look at the photographic evidence. Here’s my order from yesterday, a double Shackburger with fries and a vanilla shake, seconds after the smiling, ever-cheerful employees handed it to me:

And here’s a medium view:

And, finally, the requisite food-porn closeup:

Are you drooling yet? Look at that – the beautifully melted cheese (real cheese, not just a gloomy, cold square of processed yellow pablum), the supple bun, the redness of the fresh tomato, the green of the lettuce, those perfect, house-cut crinkle fries… This is carnivorous pulchritude personified, steamy and wonderful and ready to be enjoyed outside, in the park, on a sunny, gorgeous day.

Perfect.

(Note: click on the thumbnail for a high-res view, but be forewarned…it will make you NEED a cheeseburger.)

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