The trend in Pittsburgh food lately has been restaurants with single word names. Here’s a no-doubt incomplete list: Legume, Toast!, Spoon, Elements, Habitat, Salt, Notion, BRGR and Burgatory. These last two play to another recent trend: fancy burger joints. I see this as a good opportunity to pontificate about about burgers and burger places.
To my mind there are three things you want in a burger place. I will list them here in order of importance:
1. Good meat.
2. Fries and other side dishes.
3. An appealing atmosphere and attitude.
Now, the next thing I’m going to say will cause many in the audience to huff and puff with a general sense of disdain, because their experience may have been different than mine. But I only know what I know. In my experience, if what you are after is a really good beef hamburger with really good meat and generally well-prepared and well-served, there is only one place to go and that place is Tessaro’s.
I know that people have issues with the service there. I know that people have had issues with the kitchen there. If you are one of those people, I can’t really help you. All I can say is they serve me well every time I go there and the meat and the burgers are really still the best in the city, even with the new fancy places opening up.
Now, we can all agree that their side dishes suck. The awful excuse for “potatoes” that they serve are just shameful. But the meat is the thing, and the meat is great. Still, sides, and especially fries, can’t be discounted.
And this is where the discussion gets more complicated because the side dishes and atmosphere are where the two new places: BRGR in East Side and Burgatory in Aspinwall shine. Both have a hip young bar vibe going. Both have cool boozy milk shakes (I’ve only had the BRGR version, so I can’t comment any further). Only BRGR has good fries. Both also serve respectable beef-based hamburger sandwiches. On the whole, I think that Burgatory has better meat and BRGR is better at everything else. But neither has as good a beefy beef patty as Tessaro’s.
My conclusion is this: the meat at T’s is still the best. But the overall sandwich experience you get at the new places might be better because of their wide range of interesting toppings and sides. The Filthy-a-delphia burger at BRGR is a particularly brilliant combination.
However, BRGR loses a few points for making sandwiches out of strange patty shaped ingredients and calling them a “burger.” I guess in theory there is nothing really wrong with this, but I’m personally not very interested in going to a burger joint to get salmon, or falafel, or turkey for that matter. Turkey is a particular sore spot for me. To me, poultry is entirely unsatisfactory as a basis for a ground meat sandwich. The texture is all wrong and the fat doesn’t have great that great rush of juice when you bite into the sandwich.
Even so, the strength of the fries at BRGR more than makes up for a few weak points on the meat axis. Good fries count for a lot.
So my final order of preference is T’s, then BRGR, then Burgatory. Feel free to make your own choices. Even if you’d be wrong.
As a closing thought, I do have to give a shout out to Five Guys. Five Guys is not really in the same category as the other places we’ve discussed. It’s cheap food prepared as fast as they can do it. On its own it doesn’t really have that much character. Still, it was almost the best food that you could get near the Apple Store in Bethesda Row in Bethesda Maryland. The only place in that pathetic excuse for a gentrified outdoor mall was the great Indian restaurant my friend took me to. So, good job there.
As a second closing thought I also have to give a shout out to Little Big Burger in Portland, Oregon. They do little burgers. They do them really well. And they don’t coast on the foofiness of their toppings either. Highly recommended. Beware of the hipsters though. But if you are in Portland you already know that.
The last two times I’ve been to Burgatory, their fries have been a lot better than when we went for lunch. That time might have been a fluke.
Also, you already know this, but I remain convinced that you’re the only person in Pittsburgh who can get a good burger from Tessaro’s anymore. I won’t go there anymore because life’s too short to spend a half hour waiting for a burger that I ordered medium rare to come out as a charred hockey puck.
I am cracking up at your comment re: Bethesda Row being a gentrified outdoor mall. I understand your point, but Bethesda has been and always will be affluent town.
Burgatory does have good fries; but the thing they do there better than BRGR is the milkshakes. The caramel pretzel milkshake alone is worth the trip.
Bethesda Row was fantastically confusing to me because of all the “high end” looking offerings that turned out to be really crappy. I’ve been in its analog in San Jose CA for example where I thought things were better. But perhaps they were not. Maybe I was just bitter that the little noodle place that we were looking for just off the mall was closed.
If you were in Bethesda and missed BGR, that’s a shame. No clue if it’s related to BRGR, but it’s been there a couple years.
…What the hell, just looked at their website and apparently it is sort of a small chain now. That’s new. http://www.bgrtheburgerjoint.com/en/locations.html
(And in the DC area, Ray’s Hell Burger is still my favorite.)
The problem with Ray’s Hell Burger is that it’s right next door to that Pho place, which is less crowded and better.
The trick for getting a Ray’s Hell Burger is to actually go to Ray’s the Classics in Silver Spring. They have the burgers, better sides, and I’ve never had to wait for a table. And it’s right across from the AFI Silver Theater.
I’m in pretty much full agreement with everything the writer said here. Tessaro’s is still the most tasty and unique burger in town. I do like both BRGR and Burgatory (very slightly more than BRGR) very much though.
That all said, Tessaro’s has not been the same since Kelly died. I really hope that T and Ena and the gang down there realize that the quality is not quite the same in the past two years (I do remember being in there on Kentucky Derby Saturday two years ago, and finding out that Kelly had just had a stroke). I order my burger there medium-well. For the first 80 visits there (up to 2009), I’d estimate that 78 of those burgers were done perfectly. Very little to no pink center, but still very juicy. In the probably 18 visits over the last two years, I’d say that I’ve had only about half of my burgers done perfectly. Probably 3 were very well done, 3 medium, and 3 rare to medium-rare. In my opinion, this isn’t an exception. Something has changed there.
The only sense I can make of it is that, in busy times, the burgers do seem to arrive more quickly after ordering than they used to. That tells me that they’ve likely begun cooking burgers before they’ve been ordered. As such, I think it’s really a lot harder for the cooks to determine the done-ness of the burgers.
I want to continue to patronize Tessaro’s, but have found myself now opting for the new places occassionally. Tessaro’s still makes the best burger in town – when they get it right. Which is not so automatic as it used to be.
BRGR’s customer service is weak. I live 2 blocks away from the restaurant. A few weekends ago, we called up to place an order for takeout. I was stunned to learn that they refused to take such orders over the phone, instead directing us to come sit at the bar and place the order.
I could understand not doing take-outs at all, but forcing us to come to the bar on the hope that we’ll break down and order some overpriced alcoholic drink just so we could have some burgers while we watched TV at home? Weak.
As far as bang for the buck goes — in terms of both burgers and fries — I’m quite a fan of Five Guys. Sure, it doesn’t have the hoity-toity atmosphere, but it was better than the burgers I’ve had at Tessaro’s or at BRGR. (I have not tried Burgatory yet.)