Hubert Keller Interview, Burger Bar, and questions
Jan 2, 2008 chefs, restaurants
The December issue of St. Louis Magazine has an interview with Hubert Keller about SLeek, Burger Bar, and Keller in general.
They did however leave off my question, so if anyone gets the chance, here’s the one I desperately want an answer to: Why do you spell sleek “SLeeK”?
And for you, dear reader, is another question: Why do people feel the need to pretentiously spell the names of their restaurants with letters turned around, strangely capitalized, or replaced by numbers (F15teen)?
But I digress…here are two more Burger musings…
One, the website. You can navigate to the Burger Bar St. Louis web page via Keller’s Homepage and be promptly hit over the head by the techno music once inside. I guess this is supposed to wet my burger eating appetite, but I fail to see how it has anything to do with the look of Burger Bar with its faux diner counter and stools. If you know, please, enlighten me.
Two, the menu. There are a lot of meat choices for your burger chomping experience from the leanness of buffalo to the Omega 3 goodness of King Salmon–cheap enough that it has to be farm raised–to the Kobe (though American) that has captured the publics attention needlessly because it’s part of the $60 burger (though apparently half of that is the 1/3oz of black truffles priced out at $30).
So what I don’t get is: you can have Ridgefield Farm Beef “corn fed premium hereford beef;” you can have Black Angus Beef for another 50 cents that is “the very best grain fed beef”–grain meaning corn and soy I’m sure; or you can have the American Kobe (generally a cross between true Wagyu and Angus) which maybe got some barley or alfalfa in its longer lifespan than that of traditional cattle.
Why then, if you’re going to the trouble to offer three kinds of beef, would you not go ahead and make one of those offerings grass fed so that you can also tout the Omega 3 goodness of it as well?
If the answer would be that they wouldn’t sell enough of the grass fed beef to make it worthwhile, the obvious response, in the form of a question is: are they really going to be slamming through $60 burgers topped with truffles? I wouldn’t think so, not in St. Louis anyway.
In all fairness, I have to admit, they do look fairly tasty.
…and on Lumière Place in general… We went to Niche Sunday with my buddy Chuck, and it was the first time Ellie had seen Lumière lit up. She thought it was an eyesore, but I have to say, I kind of like it for some reason. I know it’s gaudy, but it kind of spices up the skyline when you’re crusing in from the North or South. Still, I can’t help but think they made a huge mistake with all the Vegas-like touches, because, at the end of the day, we’re still more of a buffet town than a SLeeK one.
Tags: Burger Bar, Hubert-Kellier, Lumière Place, SLeeK, stupid-restaurant-names
