Veggies and vegans,
please wipe the knowing smiles off your smug little kissers for a moment. This
is addressed to the rest of us carnivores, so you can click away or turn the
page. It's officially open season on burgers. "E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef
Inspection" read the headline on the front page of the Sunday New York Times on October 4. For two weeks, the "burger" piece was the Times' number
one e-mailed story. And every word in it was true.
If you've seen Food Inc. or
read Michael Pollan, you know the score. But there's just one tiny thing: good
burgers aren't going away, and the bad ones should. Not only is the idea of a
fat juicy burger considered an American food right, but it's arguable that a
burger, like all ground meat, actually offers a greater biological advantage
than a lean steak. Why? Because ground meat delivers protein that is more
rapidly and efficiently digested than that in a big chunk. If you don't believe
me, read MacArthur "Genius Award" winner and Harvard professor Richard
Wrangham's new book, Catching Fire:
How Cooking Made Us Human. The
burgers you don't want to eat are the ones that come with a Happy Meal. I
haven't had one of those since Luke Skywalker started to show a five o'clock
shadow. There are lots of "good burgers" in Boston - non-industrial burgers
that come from a single farm source and are ground from one good solid hunk of
muscle. Ever had the burger at Morton's? Or Grill 23? Great, right? Ground on
premise from real meat, no funny stuff.
Let's say you were in the
"good burger" business. Let's say you were someone like Michael Bissanti, owner
of Four Burgers (704 Mass Ave, Cambridge, 617.441.5444) in
Central Square. How would all the burger bad press affect your business?
"There's a line between information and panic, and I think our customers know
that line. On the Monday after the article ran in the Times, we
were a little slower than usual. But as the week progressed, we were actually
selling more beef burgers than usual in ratio to our other three fresh-ground
burgers - salmon, turkey, and vegetarian." Bissanti is a burger zealot with a
great concept: selling high-quality, grass-fed artisanal burgers in a fast-food
storefront at a price that's higher than the three-buck patty but that, at
$6.75, is within the range of good fast take-out. He says he sells "burgers that
people eat on the fly," and in an average week, he sells 1800 to 2000 burgers
out of his small storefront on Mass Ave. His beef burgers outsell the others
3:1, with the handmade veggie burger at number two in the popularity contest.
Bissanti's aim in the burger business is to "be what Starbucks is to Dunkin'
Donuts - a higher-quality version of the coffee experience."
Bissanti, who also owns the
Paramount in Beacon Hill, is burger obsessed. He'll go burger hunting in New
York or LA and have nine burgers a day. He says he "double-fists burgers -
wolfs down the first one, tears into the second more slowly, and then eats
successively fewer bites of burgers three through nine, ending up with just the
smell." Bissanti pays attention to quality first, price second. He buys the
ingredients for all four of his burgers (plus the occasional "wild card" fifth
burger like lamb or bison) very carefully: the salmon is wild caught, and the
beef is harvested from small farms and ground by Savenor's. "Burgers aren't
going away," Bissanti says. "Every day, millions of
people all over the world eat millions of burgers. But most of them I wouldn't
eat."
--Louisa Kasdon
Louisa Kasdon can be reached at
louisa@louisakasdon.com.
