Zsa Zsa Burger

Berlin, DE
www.zsazsaburger.de



The Order:  The Daffy Duck.  Fried duck with hoisin yoghurt and plum dip.  Lettuce, tomato onion and pickles on the side.  Choice of sour dough (mistranslation - should be white) or whole wheat.  No choice of how to cook the duck (-1).
Side Order:  Comes with home fries and cole slaw
€11,30
Drink Order:  Heineken (on tap! - Woo Germany!)
Burger Menu Rating:  7/15




Located in the northern part of Schöneberg in Berlin, and right near the Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station on Motzstrasse, Zsa Zsa burger sticks out amongst its surroundings, especially at night.  All around are tattoo parlors and leather shops, and not a single one of them are open past 7pm.  There are a couple other restaurants or cafes scattered around that are open, but none are so brilliantly lit up, or quite so trendy as Zsa Zsa is.  As you walk into the brightly lit restaurant, you're greeted by sparsely adorned walls, mirrors, antique odds and ends, and a deer skull.  These kinds of stylings are all the rage in Berlin these days, as trendy cafes pop up all over.  Mostly, though, they're all cafes and coffee shops.  In Zsa Zsa we have a burger restaurant.


Look how fancy this place is.

Zsa Zsa is clearly catering to both foreigners and German natives (they give you forks and knives in a bucket on the table so you can make your own choice).  As we sat down, we noticed three different parties of English-speakers scattered throughout the restaurant, so they're definitely doing something right in that regard.  Whether that's because their website is in both English and German from the get-go, or for some other reason, is unknown to me.  The menu is also both in German and English, and starts off slowly with the usual classics, but then things get crazy!  You've got your hamburger, breakfast burger, mexican burger, and Blue Cheese Burger, but then you've got a Cuban burger, a Spanish (Iberico) burger, an Italian burger, Asian, African, duck, and chicken!  Check out the Egyptian: beef with dried figs, goat cheese and thyme honey au gratin. What?! That sounds amazing.  A great array of flavors here.  You could come here all the time and not get bored.


The Egyptian.  This one was ordered medium. Cooked correctly.

First of all, the onions that came with my burger weren't regular uncooked onions.  They were fried onions.   That's fine, but you've got to be specific on your menu!  I looked at my burger, which consisted of mere pieces of duck, then looked at the pile of toppings and decided to dump them all on top of the burger.  Then I tasted the plum sauce.  Wham.  Loads of flavor here, and pieces of plum mixed in as well.  The sauce was sweet, but not tangy or anything else, but this sugary explosion didn't need a built in counterpoint to balance it out.  The duck and onions would do that.  So instead of using it as a 'dipping sauce' I slathered it on the bun.   The bun, by the way, wasn't Sourdough.  There was a bad translation though, and that was definitely disappointing.  The flavor of Sourdough would have been excellent on this kind of burger.  But, the end result was pretty good.  The plum sauce was sweet and mixed with the salty flavors of duck and onion, the burger was quite tasty.  Unfortunately, the hoisin yoghurt was totally overpowered. When tried on its own it didn't do much anyways and just kind of tasted like yoghurt.  What was nice was that the duck had the skin and fat on it. It was cut into strips and laid on the bun.  It kind of paled in comparison to my girlfriend's beef burger, but with everything piled on, it was pretty substantial.


Skimpy duck pieces on my Daffy Duck.

This, unfortunately, doesn't really count as a burger. It wasn't even a patty of any kind. I expected the duck to be ground quickly post cooking into a patty, or to have it at least be a full piece of duck, or even to have a big pile of duck to make an impressive sandwich, but the slim amount of duck, combined with its overall lack of burger-ness was a bit disappointing.  The duck was also overcooked.  Sure the skin was fried and crispy, but the meat itself was cooked to medium/medium-well, and when you're serving duck breast, you DEFINITELY want it to be medium rare.  It's far juicier, and the meat isn't all tough and unsatisfying.  So all in all my burger was a bit unsatisfying.  Sure I was full afterwards, but there was a wow-factor in this burger that I was expecting because of the ingredients.  Not like my girlfriend's burger.  Which looked and tasted awesome.


I'd totally come back for this.

The fries also left something to be desired.  Uniformly cooked, and seasoned with a bit of salt, the flavor, even with ketchup, didn't stand up to the strong sweet and salty flavors. They were a bit thickly cut too.  They weren't quite the size of steak fries, but bigger than a normal medium cut.  On a side note, the more I eat burgers and fries, the more I feel like chefs add on the fries as an afterthought with no concern to how the flavors pair with the burgers they're being served alongside.  The cole slaw as an additional side was nice.  It was tangy, a little bit sour, and the carrots and cabbage in it were crisp.  It was actually some damn good cole slaw.

So what would bring me back to Zsa Zsa?  Besides the Egyptian?  All the other beef burger options.  And the add-ons.  Basically any ingredient on any of their burgers, plus a few others, are all options you can add to the burger you're eating, which basically gives you a massive number of burger creations for your eating pleasure.  And if they cook the burger as well as they did in the above picture, I would definitely make the trek out here to try this again.  I just wouldn't get the duck burger again.




Cooked Correctly:  2.5/5
Design/Ingredients:  1.5/4
Plating:  2/3
Value:  1/3 (not enough duck meat)

Brooklyn Burger Bar

Hamburg, DE
www.brooklynburgerbar.de



The Order:  The Def Jam, medium rare. Beef with Fourme d'Ambert, Arugula, Beefsteak Tomato, and Bacon Marmalade.
Side Order:   Sweet Potato Fries, with Red Ranch Dip. Fried in Canola oil and tossed with sea salt and cayenne.
€10 + €4,50 = €14,50
Drink Order:  Pilsner Urquell
Burger Menu Rating:  9/15




I know what you were thinking. A new burger place in Brooklyn! Well you thought wrong. Sorry to disappoint. But for all you Germans reading this. YOU can be excited about a new burger joint in Hamburg! The new Brooklyn Burger Bar (the 2nd "NY Style" burger restaurant in Hamburg), from owner Steffen Schröder of Streit's Lounge, is doing some interesting things with their burgers, and with a dedication to sourcing locally, and making everything in-house, you can be sure that they care about their product. The buns are made by a local bakery that uses only organic ingredients for the buns, delivered fresh every day. The same goes for all the sauces they use. The beef is supplied from a distributor in the north of Germany. It's grass-fed and the cows are raised (somewhere) in the north of Germany as well.

As far as taste goes, this burger is doing something right, and something a little different, but it's really difficult to put my finger on it. The Fourme d'Ambert, one of the oldest French cheeses - a blue cheese - adds a nice musky flavor, but overall this burger is really salty, and it's salty to a point of distraction! Perhaps it was the bacon marmalade, which was delicious and added a nice texture that was slightly buttery but with big firm chunks in it. My experience with bacon in Germany has been that it's generally very salty, so perhaps the bacon and the amount of salt they used on the patty combined to overwhelm the rest of the flavors of the burger. That all being said, there were some other spices in play here that I couldn't exactly figure out. It was almost a combination of Middle Eastern spices, or some kind of curry powder on there as well. There was a distinct tang to the flavor of the meat that I was able to discern that had me very excited.


The Def Jam laid open.  Unfortunately overcooked to medium, instead of medium rare.

The other thing about this burger was that unfortunately as I ate my way from the center to the outside, it got less and less exciting. The patty was overcooked (-1) to begin with, but then it was also very unevenly cooked. Towards the edges, the patty became completely gray, dry and a bit tough (-1). This burger could have easily scored an 11/15 just by cooking this correctly.  Perhaps they didn't compress the center of the patty, and maybe the grill wasn't hot enough. Either way, the cooking of the patty could use some help here. Overall there's room for improvement on the burger. Being cooked correctly would be the first major order of business, and then balancing out the flavors would follow. If they can pull that off, they'll have one heck of a burger here.

The sweet potato fries and spicy ranch dip are pretty stellar. If you're reading this Steffen, PLEASE DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT THEM! They were addicting and perfect. A tiny bit of smokiness, the right amount of salt and cayenne, and the ranch dip made these things impossible to put down. By the end of the meal, we were all full, but still chowing down on our healthy portions of fries. €4,50 is a bit steep for this side, but I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't pay for it every time I went there.


The Brooklyn Classic, with Romaine, Beefsteak Tomato, Red Onion, Pickles and Ketchup.

Aside from burgers, which dominate their food menu, Brooklyn Burger Bar also serves two salads, two other meat dishes (the chili sounds the most intriguing), and a boatload of delicious cocktails. We sampled a few that were all spectacular. Given Schröder's bar experience in Hamburg already, this is nothing less than should be expected from his new venture.

If you're planning on going here, plan on being disappointed. Not by their food. When we left were full, and satisfied. No, plan on being disappointed by the inability to get a table at this place. Two of us had to email and call multiple times to try to get a reservation. Here's an insider's tip: make sure you try to make the reservation at least two days in advance.  However, this isn't a guarantee that they'll actually write you back. Don't bother calling, and don't bother sending them an email like their answering machine tells you to. Send them a message through their Facebook account. It took them a full day and a half to write back to me to tell me they didn't have a reservation for me, by which point my friend had a reservation already (who wrote a day after I did).


If this doesn't say 'classy', I don't know what does.

On top of all of that, everybody in town is talking about 'the new burger restaurant on Alter Fischmarkt by the Scientology place' so don't expect to be able to walk in and get a table, or even a seat at the bar, unless MAYBE you get there right at 6pm when they open, and they're in a charitable mood.  They're swamped every single night, with every table booked.  If the masses are any indication, they're doing something right.  Granted the burger scene in Hamburg isn't much to speak about on the whole, but as they get settled get everything figured out, and if they can make some major, but easy, improvements, Brooklyn Burger Bar is sure to be a fixture in Hamburg for years to come.





Cooked Correctly:  3/5
Design/Ingredients:  2.5/4
Plating:  2/3
Value:  1.5/3

Ramen Burger

Brooklyn, NY (Smorgasburg)
www.facebook.com/RamenBurger



The Order:  A Ramen Burger, medium.  With cheese (white American), scallions, arugula and a secret sauce (Shoyu?), all on a ramen noodle bun.
Side order:  No sides available
$8 + $1 (cheese) = $9
Drink Order: Oi Ocha unsweetened Green Tea.
Burger Menu Rating:  11/15




My Ramen Burger journey began on August 1st, 2013, with Eataku's announcement that Keizo Shimamoto would be bringing his version of the Ramen Burger to Williamsburg on August 8th.  And what misfortune I had!  That morning, I would be flying out to Los Angeles for work!  I tried my best to enlist the help of various foodie friends in going to try this delicious burger, but to no avail.  Even my sister, Ramen Lady, couldn't go (she's taking a bit of a break from Ramen Blogging what with her son being recently born and all).  My mouth was watering and I couldn't get anybody to go.  And what a fail on my part!  It isn't often that I know of these momentous burger happenings BEFORE they happen, and yet I still couldn't get a guest blogger to go in my stead.  Alas.  What is the world coming to.

Over the next few months, I was thwarted at every turn.  It seemed that every Saturday from August til the middle of October, I was either working, or out of town working.  That is, until the morning of October 19th!  In reality, that day's expedition began the evening before.  I got back into town from Los Angeles a week early, and was using that time to go out and see friends.  That Friday Night, the 18th, my friends and I had tickets to go see Eric Prydz and Jeremy Olander spin at Hammerstein, but would I let that stop me from getting a Ramen Burger?!  No!!  There was no way in hell I was going to let a night of partying til past 4:00AM get in the way of me getting a burger, and having heard about the limited number of burgers being sold every weekend, I was determined to be there early enough to get a burger.


Look at all the fun I was having until VERY EARLY IN THE MORNING.


I dragged myself out of bed at 8:30 in the morning to get dressed and get over to Smorgasburg.  8:30 in the morning on a Saturday morning isn't so bad by itself, but after going to sleep at almost 5 in the morning it's a bit rough.


This is me after sleeping for almost NO HOURS.

I'd heard that the line at the Sun Noodle Lab stand would be long, and that there would only be a limited number of burgers, so getting there at about 9:30 in the morning, 1.5 hours before opening, seemed like a perfect time.  Right?  I mean, if you were craving this burger for months, and finally had ONE opportunity to go, wouldn't you want to make sure you didn't fuck it up?  Exactly.  So 1.5 hours was the PERFECT amount of time.  I got there so early that.. well... they hadn't actually started setting up their stand yet.


This is what victory looks like.  Somewhat desolate actually.


Keizo and his cadre began to set up their stand at about 10am.

At about 10:00 they began setting up there stand, and Keizo came over to me, asking if I was waiting for a Ramen burger.  There was a mixture of bemusement and disbelief on his face as I said that I was, in fact, waiting for one of his burgers.  He moved me over to where they formed the line, and THAT was when it dawned on me.  Not only was I DEFINITELY going to get a burger, but I was the FIRST in line that day.  So I could've definitely come a little later, but then I would've missed out on what happened to me only a little while later on.


Keizo, seasoning and cooking the burger patties.

I started to get very excited, though a bit confused, because by 10:30 or so, Keizo was cooking burgers and heating up Ramen buns.  There was no way they could be preparing these for the people they were going to be selling to.  At that point, there were only about 4 of us in line, and the stand wasn't supposed to open for half an hour!


Ramen buns warming on the grill.

To add to my confusion, it seemed like they were plating and taking lots of pictures of the burgers they were making.  Surely they'd done this back in August when they debuted the Ramen Burger?  And then they all huddle in a circle and at them!  The tyranny!  Then it hit me.  Something new must be going on here.  Then, 11:00 rolled around and Keizo came to talk to the line of people no waiting, probably about 30 of us).  He thanked us all for waiting, and told us that there was something new for us!  The first release in the US of Keizo's Ramen Burger with Cheese!  And I was going to be the FIRST TO GET ONE!!  Fuck yeah!  Getting up early totally rules!


This is me.  FIRST IN LINE, BITCHES! Also looking much happier than I was a few hours earlier.


The front table:  Prep and plating.

They pre-warm the bun and have all the ingredients fresh and ready to plate your burger in front of your eyes.  A big bunch of arugula, then the patty goes down, followed by the scallions and the sauce.


It was like Christmas morning.

Then the whole thing gets wrapped up in PleatPak, a nifty little eco-friendly recycled paper wrapper that forms a kind of cup and captures your burger juices and droppings.


Finally unwrapped out of its sultry sultry shell!

The burger is everything you hope and expect that it will be.  The Ramen bun held up well, and the burger overall was a fantastic mixture of Asian flavors.  The meat was a little too tightly packed, and was cooked Medium as a standard, both detriments to this burger's score, but the scallions, sauce and ramen came together for something altogether different and interesting.  The mouthfeel alone is worth it.  The bun was firm but soft and pliable, and the juices helped to soften and keep the bun warm.  The other ingredients are fresh, and add bursts of flavor in every bite.  Everything, that is, except for the white American Cheese.  As far as cheeses go, American cheese doesn't really excite in anyways.  It's got a bit of a pasty mouthfeel, and doesn't particularly add any flavor to the burger, especially when the other ingredients have such strong and distinct flavors.  Perhaps if this was a cheese with a bit of a sharper flavor profile, it would be worth the extra $1, but considering the price of American cheese in any supermarket, what you're getting is worth much less than the extra $1.

The whole burger is actually a bit reminiscent of "The Anime" burger from Go Burger a while back, although that was a completely different kind of richness (pork belly?! mmmmm).  This burger is much more simple.  Refined and elegant in its use of ingredients.  Would I go on a Ramen Burger journey again?  Yes.  Would I go again at 9:30 in the morning after partying all night?  No.  Would I go for the cheese again?  No.  But all in all this was a very good burger.  And while all the other 'substitute-bun' burgers are trying to gain their place in America's stomachs (is it just me, or does the "Mac-Attack Burger" look disgusting in EVERY picture), this is one burger that isn't just a fad.  It's here to stay.





Cooked Correctly:  4/5 (no choice - medium)
Design/Ingredients:  3/4
Value:  2/3 (3/3 without cheese)
Plating:  2/3