Rachael Ray

It’s not the flavor of gourmet hamburgers that I hate so much. It’s not their dense and cloying buns. Their mushy pickles don’t annoy me that much, and their meat is often very good indeed. No, my problem with them is hypocrisy.

Let me back up a little. Over the years, I know that I have been ungenerous towards gourmet hamburgers. I have abused them in print, badmouthed them in private, railed against their makers and the consumers alike. I have alienated myself from half the hamburger-loving population. And so I want to clarify my position.

I’m not against innovation. I like all the burgers Rachael makes – her beer burger, her sage-scented veal burgers, and so on. What galls me so is the shameless pretense of a thousand thousand “artisanal” hamburgers, each of which portrays itself as a blow against conformity – and all of which are, in the grossest of ironies, all exactly alike.

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Let me ask you if you’ve seen this hamburger before. There’s a large, slightly imperfect brioche bun covered with seeds on top. A large gob of farmhouse cheddar rests waxily on top. There is a house-made ketchup which, thanks to fish sauce / kim chi / sriracha has a little more heat than usual. Applewood smoked bacon is on top, because that sounds better than hickory smoked bacon. The pickles are made in-house too, and are twice the size of normal pickle chips. The meat is somewhere between a disc and a ball, with glistening gray sides. Top-shelf onions and tomatoes, and an incongruously cheap boston lettuce leaf sit uneasily atop the whole thing.

Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the unvarying formula for practically every single gourmet burger in the country. Don’t believe me? Check out this New York Magazine survey from a couple of years ago of 82 burgers from around the city. It’s a parade of horrors. And the worst thing about it is the fearsome uniformity, of one monster after another, each deformed in the exact same way. These aren’t hamburgers; they’re fantasmagoria, Dick Tracy villains, exhibits in a Mutter Museum of bad sandwiches.

I don’t hold it against them that they don’t taste good, or that they are hard to eat, or that their cheese is incapable of holding any state between caulking and fondue. No, I object to their creators presenting them as alternative or progressive products, indie artifacts fashioned by the hands of People Who Care. But, far from letter their freak flags fly high, these bad burgers are the product of cynicism and reflex. They are knee-jerk reactions to market demographics, unconscious fight-or-flight responses by bored businessmen. An innovative hamburger would, by definition, depart from the conventions of the day, not follow them slavishly; nor would someone who wanted to make it well possibly believe that these grotesqueries actually constituted an improvement over the simple sandwich that conquered the world.

Like many a better man and a keener observer of society, I can easily forgive incompetence and unoriginality; but never when they post as skill and creativity.