[Photographs: Damon Gambuto]

The Oaks Gourmet is the kind of establishment that most of us walk into and think, "This place could be trouble." The shelves are stacked with all manner of tempting, gastronomic wallet-emptiers that seem at once copious luxury and soulful necessity. You can feel week's worth of responsible, personal finance decisions about your food and drink—brown-bag lunches, home brewed coffee—evanescing into the rarefied air as newfound 'necessities' present themselves in the form of artisanal chutneys and truffle-infused salt.

For the lucky few, places like The Oaks Gourmet can serve as supermarkets, but for the rest of us, it's an exercise in aspirational lifestyle consumption. It is that place at the end of the rainbow where we imagine ourselves shopping if freed from the fetters of our limited disposal incomes and delivered to day-to-day pursuit of our taste's refinement. We could while away the hours conferring with Martha Stewart's florist and consulting with the food-world's rainmakers. What going to a place like this affords us is a holiday from a life of dedicated to affordability. Certainly, there are very real delights to be had among all this unprincipled pleasure, but much of what the experience becomes is an exercise in identification. They are selling us a twisted, commercial-age version of an old cliché: we are what we eat. Of course, I ordered a pricey burger.

The Oaks menu calls their version "The Dry Age Burger," which seems to be one of three things: an attempt at personalization, a simple typographical error omitting the "d," or a gift for a reviewer who happens to dislike overcooked meat. Whichever the case, this half-pound of dry aged beef comes topped with Taleggio cheese, Black Forest bacon, red onion, tomato, arugula, and a smoked jalepeno-pineapple compote, all served on a toasted brioche bun. It is, as they say, the full treatment, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was a treat.

The beef is formed into an impressive looking patty that, by my judgment, actually weighs in a little heavier than eight ounces and is grilled (despite the counter-person's claims of it being griddled). That misstep is not much of one in the larger scheme of things, but turned out to be a harbinger.

The burger arrived in a cardboard container, paper-wrapped with juices flowing. When I unwrapped the wet mass of paper, one thing dominated the look of the burger (or make that two things): Two thick strips of bacon poked out of this burger as if paying homage to The Rolling Stones. In fact, the general impression of how they put this sandwich together was more rock and roll than classical. The bun was unevenly cut and the toppings looked thrown on in slap-dash fashion. In fact, the first few bites were basically just meat and bun.

I couldn't get to the toppings until about a third of the way through the burger. When I took the top bun off to take a look under the hood, I noticed a ridiculous clump of Taleggio and one slice of tomato. I'm not so much against restraint when it comes to the toppings, but this was clearly just sloppy work. That said, it did give me the chance to try the backbone of this burger, the dry aged meat, against bun.

Sadly, all I found was desiccated disappointment. The meat couldn't even be called medium—It was charred to a dried mass of well done. Other than lack of flavor and terrible texture, overcooked burgers are fine. I know some of you out there choose this temperature, but for me it renders out not just the fat of the meat, but also the reason I want the meat there at all. That said, if there is any burger blend that will step up to the heat it is a dry aged blend. No such luck here: The Oaks blend was bland, lacking not just a good seasoning, but also the richer, fuller flavor that comes with proper aging. "The Dry Age Burger" at The Oaks, it seems, lives up to its name.

The addition of the toppings helped a bit, but despite the high-end appeal (the tomato was particularly rich), there seemed a lack of any cohesion. The bun was the flaky mess that brioche so often is, and the bacon, while a nicely thick and chewy against a good char, wasn't enough to save this passive patty from the doldrums. I found myself laboring to get through even half of this bland behemoth.

The promise of a high-end shop like The Oaks Gourmet is often kept through the careful curation of the items on the shelves. In this regard, they do their duty. The selection of oils, cheeses, and jams is well-managed, but when it comes the food prepared on site, at best they stumbled; at worst, they were in dereliction. Perhaps it's the focusing effects of a down economy, but I think it's just the simple logic of being a serious eater who doesn't mind pulling back a curtain: no matter the cache of the destination, paying so much on a bland, well-done burger isn't money well spent.