![]() The Link Ray tastes like what might happen if a mojito and a Bloody Mary had a baby and named her Celery. The Gibson carries sour currents of the brine from pickled onions. The burger goes well with the cocktails, which are better than you’d expect from an establishment that might have hired Jimmy Buffett as its interior decorator. Double-pattied, expertly seasoned, dripping with American cheese, canyon-deep with flavor from onion confit and a sauce touched with mustard, the burger is so terrific that it makes you wonder whether the folks in the kitchen, led by the chef Thomas Lim, huddled one day and decided to dedicate every ounce of their energy to the pursuit of cheeseburger perfection, ignoring all else. There are several on the menu, but the $12 Happiest Burger, a blatant homage to the California-born In-N-Out burger, is the showstopper. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.īut oh, that burger. Key factors make a BLT crave-worthy: crispiness, freshness, an open embrace of mayonnaise. With gummy bacon, an unwelcome tug of sweetness and a thick bready roll as a roof, the World’s Best BLT seemed to be suffering from serious delusions about its global significance. The Bonsai Chicken Bites, somehow echoing the color of the overcast skies that Southern Californians refer to as June Gloom, had endured enough time in frying oil to achieve the gnarled, petrified texture of old saltwater taffy. Because even though the menu listed many dishes besides the burger, I soon realized that most of them were not worth ordering. I needed the salty-beefy-gooey satisfaction of that Cali-style burger, and I wanted it paired with the clear-as-glass, iceberg-frosty ping of a dry martini.Īfter a few visits, I wound up thinking that the people behind the Happiest Hour (veterans of Acme and the Pegu Club) must be in the grips of the same flavor myopia as mine. In a true and precise poem called “Specific Hunger,” the Scottish writer Roddy Lumsden talks about this sort of appetite memory, the way we find ourselves pining for “sweet deep-fried sausages from a chip shop” or “chicken in soy sauce from that takeaway.”Įarly reports about the Happiest Hour tapped a specific hunger in me. I’ve never forgotten the pleasure of that. On Friday evenings, a colleague and I would cross Anacapa Street and cap off a week of deadlines with a simple meal: a juicy burger and a discount martini at a quintessentially West Coast place called the Paradise Cafe. I remembered a ritual from the early 1990s, when I worked as a music columnist at a daily newspaper in Santa Barbara, Calif. ![]() When I first heard about the burger at the Happiest Hour, a cocktail bar in Greenwich Village where the décor is heavy on the palm fronds and the soundtrack is heavy on Tom Petty, it dislodged a memory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |