PrintAn Overcooked Burger Is Saved by Good Seasoning at Erwin in Chicago
Note: Serious Eats contributor Daniel Zemans is better known for his Chicago pizza reviews on Slice, but now he'll be covering the burger scene as well (hopefully not doing too much damage to his health in the process). Look out for his burger reviews every other Thursday on AHT. Take it away, Daniel!
Erwin
2925 N. Halsted Street, Chicago IL 60657 (map); 773-528-7200; erwincafe.com
Cooking Method: Grilled
Short Order: The burger is seasoned so well that it tastes very good even when overcooked.
Want Fries With That? Definitely. The hand-cut skin-on fries come with the burger and are great.
Price: $13, + $1 for cheese and +$3 for bacon
I hate to start my stint as a regular contributor to A Hamburger Today with a less than stellar review, so let me start by putting as positive a spin as possible on the next few paragraphs: I liked absolutely everything about Erwin except for the fact that my burger was severely overcooked. The seasoning, the fries, the service, and the dessert were all good to excellent. But the burger, #20 on the recent Chicago Magazine list and recently ranked by Time Out Chicago as the best classic burger in town, was disappointingly cooked to medium/medium well and I ordered it rare.
Erwin, the eponymous restaurant of chef Erwin Dreschler and his wife Cathy, both former teachers in Chicago Public Schools, has been going strong in the heart of Lakeview for fifteen years. Erwin has long featured local seasonal ingredients in making what the restaurant calls “Urban Heartland cuisine." While many of the menu items change, the popular burger is a permanent fixture.
The classic hamburger, which comes with hand cut fries, cole slaw, and three slices of a homemade pickle, is offered with either a white cheddar or a blue cheese. Applewood smoked bacon is an optional add-on as well. While I ordinarily jump at the chance to add good quality blue cheese to my burger, our server emphasized the white cheddar, so I followed her advice. I skipped the bacon and requested my burger rare.
The burger is served on a good toasted roll that has a texture between a standard bun and a pretzel roll. I appreciated the extra heft that the bun brought given the seasoning in the meat, though I would have liked it even more with sesame seeds on it. The hand cut, skin-on fries at Erwin are excellent—surprisingly greaseless, well salted, and absolutely packed with potato flavor. The cole slaw, which also comes with the burger, was also excellent and found a nice balance between creamy and vinegary. Unfortunately, I cannot speak to the quality of the homemade pickles as my dining companion stole them.
As soon as cut into the burger, my heart sank (and it sank again when I realized my picture was blurry). I know there are people out there who think that a well done burger is acceptable and even desirable. I am not one of those people. That said, I have issues about sending my food back—I almost never do it. So there I was, crestfallen at facing a burger that I'd ordered rare, but had not even a morsel of pink beef anywhere inside.
I took a bite of the burger and was pleasantly surprised. Although it didn't live up to my high expectations going into the evening, it vastly exceeded what I thought I'd be eating based on the brownness of the meat. Texturally, it was a very good burger—there were ample bits of char along the outside and the inside managed to be both very soft and relatively juicy. The burger was actually so soft that, had it been served rare, I would be worried about the texture.
The seasoning in the Erwin burger, supposedly the result of garlic and a chili sauce, is very good. I didn’t think I tasted anything resembling chili sauce, but the garlic was there as were a variety of other flavors that really worked well together. Also, because the burgers at Erwin are cooked over a wood-burning fire, the meat was infused with a smoke flavor that makes virtually all cooked foods taste better. Between the good seasoning and the smoke, I was able to thoroughly enjoy what was, to my tastes, an overcooked burger. I can easily see why people who like their burgers cooked medium or better would identify Erwin’s as one their favorites in Chicago.
A review of Erwin’s would not be complete without mention of their desserts. This is a restaurant that offers ten different entrees and eight different desserts. Clearly, sweets are no afterthought. After some deep soul-searching, I went with the sour cherry pie, which featured Michigan cherries and came with a scoop of French vanilla ice cream. The pie was exquisite. Between the light, buttery, flaky powder sugar-covered dough was a massive amount of sour cherries bathing in a complementary sweet filling. And because ice cream just makes everything taste better, the scoop beside the pie was a welcome addition.
For those particularly interested in Erwin’s style of cooking, chef Erwin is offering a shopping and cooking class three more times this year that includes a Saturday trip to a farmers' market and a Monday cooking class and meal at the restaurant. At $50 per person, including wine, it seems like a good deal. And Speaking of good deals, if you're heading to Erwin Café, don’t miss out on restaurant.com’s $25 gift certificate.
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10 Comments:
I always wonder what the deal is with restaurants which offer to cook a burger to order and then EVERY SINGLE TIME cook it medium-well to well-done. You'd think common sense would tell them that raising a customer's expectations and then letting them down is a less customer-friendly way to do business than just saying (as many chains do) that they don't offer burgers cooked less than medium-well.
ChloeA at 11:23AM on 08/27/09
did you try sending it back or at least expressing your dissatisfaction?
engmcmuffin at 11:52AM on 08/27/09
Hmmmm. I didn't realize people still ate rare hamburgers.
oh_no_eric at 12:20PM on 08/27/09
Never had the burger, but I loooove Erwin. We go there every time we are in Chicago. Their brunch is delicious. And it's the only time that I have ever been congratulated on my order by a server.
shandygirl at 12:49PM on 08/27/09
ChloeA, I'm with you. Last time I ordered a burger and they asked me how I would like it cooked, I said medium rare. Their response? "Um...we'll try but it will probably come out medium well." THEN WHY ASK ME, RESTAURANT I USUALLY LOVE? I would probably be fine with the med-well burger if not given the false hope of a lesser done patty. Sigh.
car1fsu at 1:07PM on 08/27/09
Here follows a rant about doneness.
First, as I have stated before, there is no universally agreed code of doneness. Your rare might be my medium. My medium might be someone else's well done. Much better to describe in colour or juciness (and the colour of the juices).
Second, grills and griddles do not run at a constant temperature. A busy grill or griddle will be cooled off by having cold beef chucked on it. I always trained my assistants to flip the patty onto a hot part of the grill.
Third, a good grill cook will be looking at 6-10 tickets at the same time. If you get a group, one who wants rare, another medium and a third well, you have to time putting everything on the grill precisely...a few seconds is all it takes to screw everything up. People want their food at the same time. Now imagine having six of those orders at once.
If the food is not as you ordered it, send it back, but only if you were specific in your order. I had a guy who ordered a grilled cheese, bacon and tomato on wheat, only to send it back because he didn't like wheat. I had a regular who hated having the bun on his burger toasted but never told anyone. So he'd send it back.
Finally, complicated orders take time to write and time to read. 'Burger, medium, bacon, Swiss cheese, mushrooms, no lettuce, no tomato, extra pickle, mayo and mustard, Kaiser roll, toasted'. Now imagine a ticket with four or more such orders, all different.
In short, give the grill guy a break most of the time.
NotAmerican at 1:21PM on 08/27/09
Ate at a chain (Ruby's) yesterday, asked for my American Kobe to be cooked medium rare, waiter said they don't do less than medium to medium well.
Ok, so what do I get? Well Plus! It was a hard hocky puck.
Typical of Ruby's, I suspect they squeeze the burgers on the griddle to push out any remaining juice. It had a nice crust, but was otherwise chewy, and tough.
Bleah!
peekpoke at 3:36PM on 08/27/09
NotAmerican, I'm understanding if a restaurant says they can't cook a burger to order. My gripe is that they so often say they can and then don't--and it's always on the overdone side.
However, speaking about the U.S. (which I take from your moniker might not apply to you) I must respectfully disagree that there's no universal code for doneness. In my experience, rare is generally understood to be basically warm but raw in the middle. Medium rare is slightly more cooked but still very juicy. Medium is pink all the way through. Medium-well is pink only in the center. At well-done, the pink is history.
Even if one quibbles a little from one step to the next, there's no way a burger with no pink fits anyone's definition of medium rare. That happens to me all to often these days.
ChloeA at 4:35PM on 08/27/09
a burger that is over-done can never by saved by anything, not even the best seasoning.....
i don't know why they ask for a temperature if they can't pull it off.....
we went to an upscale burger/steak house the other nite and ordered a burger med. rare and it came out well done .... i sent it back -- which i hate doing, but, man, if they're offering great meat and asking temps ... they better be able to deliver ..... sorry, overdone meat just pisses me off.
pooch at 9:20PM on 08/27/09
I'm with you, pooch. That's why I've pretty much taken to either preparing my own at home (and now I usually use ground pork), or going to places like Steak and Shake, where I can expect to get a cheap but tasty thin burger cooked (hopefully) to the point of caramelizing on the flat top. Either way, I don't have to chew...and chew...and chew...that relatively tasteless, textureless dry ground meat.
ChloeA at 3:28PM on 08/28/09