Call it the burger version of the east coast-west coast rap feuds. Only a couple of weeks after California’s The Counter opened, serving up customisable burgers with up to a billion possible configurations comes New York’s Burger Joint.
They serve a whopping five options.
And two of those options are simply doubles — a double cheeseburger and a double hamburger. The third wildcard is the grilled cheeseburger.
The Joint’s founder, Steven Pipes, chuckled when I asked if he saw it as a face-off — he’s a pretty relaxed guy “just getting to do what I love — making burgers”.
A hamburger is Dh30 (a double is Dh45) and a cheeseburger is Dh35 (double, Dh55). A whole pickle is Dh5, and fries Dh12.
So what’s in these burgers? American beef, ground in house daily with an 80-20 ratio of meat to fat (that’s the magic burger ratio, by the way). The buns and fries are being brought in from the US, as finding a local baker to make the kind he likes hasn’t been possible yet, Pipes tells me (that’s the case for The Counter, and the upcoming Clinton St Bakery too — a good bun is hard to find, it seems).
The Burger Joint (not to be confused with the restaurant of the same name in Atlantis’ The Avenues) started life in the Le Parker Meridien in the early 2000s, and is still as nondescript, keeping a low profile in a high-end hotel. It’s a story that could almost have come from Dubai, our own city a basion of in-hotel eateries. Pipes is the GM of the hotel, and he decided to redo the hotel’s bar into a small spot serving a limited burger menu. It didn’t have a name then, but the thousands of people who started queueing out the door to buy their food started calling it the burger joint.
One of those people was Danny Meyer, a founder of Shake Shack, something which the ever-chilled Pipes is happy to share.
Just don’t ask him to cook the burgers on a flat-top grill. “It just ends up cooking in its own fat,” says Pipes.
The opening here came about as so many international favourites transplanted here do — with a UAE fan loving it and inviting Pipes to open here. They’re also open in South Korea, but have rebuffed many other international offers, Pipes says. The City Walk outlet is open now, with an Abu Dhabi outlet in the works.
