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The chef has a love-hate relationship with your favourite burger

- JULIA MOSKIN

Last year, chef Jeremy Fox started developing a recipe for a cheeseburger at his Santa Monica, California, restaurant Birdie G’s. It affected him in strange ways.

“For the last more-than-a-decade, any mention of a burger was extremely triggering for me,” he wrote on Instagram, because it brought back memories of customers storming out of his other restaurant, Rustic Canyon.

There, “my marching orders were to get rid of the burger” he said. “So people would actually order the farmers’ market dishes.”

For a decade, Santa Monica had been divided between two beloved burgers: the Father's Office (Gruyère, caramelised onions, arugula, aioli) and the Rustic Canyon (Cheddar, pickles, onion fondue, herb rémoulade) created by the previous chef, Evan Funke.

But the drippy deliciousness of the Rustic Canyon burger had become an existential threat to the restaurant. Of 180 diners per night, said Fox, 75 to 80 would reliably order the burger, which was priced under US$20 (665 baht). It generated little profit, and a lot of work, and the owners wanted it gone.

“All the food runners had time to do was fill up ramekins with aioli and ketchup and rémoulade,” he said. Also, customers inevitably expect burgers to conform to personal taste, removing pickles, adding mayonnaise and changing cheeses at will, with each component adding to chaos in the kitchen.

“Everyone loved it except us,” Fox said.

High-end restaurants have long served burgers, but usually as a concession to popular demand, not as part of an ambitious menu. Today, trained chefs who would once have considered a burger beneath them spend years developing personal meat blends and customised buns.

But ever since the trend took off in the early 2000s, chefs have nursed complicated feelings about their creations. Burgers bring in more customers, but they spend less.