Restaurants are great at hospitality once you sit down
The instructions on how to secure a reservation at Fedora, a great restaurant in the West Village run by my pal Gabe Stulman, run 241 words. Let me highlight the broad strokes. Reservations are only taken between 11 AM and 10 PM. Ditto cancellations. If you want to cancel at, say, 10 AM, you cannot because voicemail cancellations aren't honored. There is also a cancellation fee, although the dollar amount of said fee isn't specified. For same-day cancellations, you have one hour to do so, since they must be made by noon to avoid fees and the phone line opens at 11 AM. In short, you are strongly encouraged to walk-in and just wait. Great for the restaurant and a huge pain in the ass for guests, who don't even get priority at the bar (it's seated with people eating dinner).
At Spotted Pig, the third of three of my favorite restaurants included in this post, things are so bad that owner Ken Friedman has fully acknowledged that a huge swath of New Yorkers wouldn't dream of enduring the process of getting in.
* * *
I have, of course, a vested interest in how restaurants handle reservations these days. And I've spoken to hundreds of restaurant operators now about this. I am consistently and totally fascinated by how little care even the very best restaurateurs give their customers before they sit down. Hopefully, even if they're kicking and screaming the whole way, we can do something to change the house's approach.
Eater was sold to Vox Media at the end of last year and as a result it will change more in 2014 than it has during the entire rest of its existence. I think Amanda Kludt and her team are doing an excellent job. As exciting as this evolution is to watch, it has me a little bit nostalgic, frankly. It has me missing the old days — and you’ll forgive my cheap back-in-the-day riff here — when features like the Deathwatch and the IMterview roamed. When this story ran.
It led me to reach out to Adam Kuban earlier this year to ask him if we could get together and chat. On paper I was interviewing him for sort of a Where Are They Now: Adam Kuban, but practically speaking, I just wanted to hang with an OG food blogger, one whose output, regardless of platform, I've always enjoyed.
Kuban started Slice, a blog about pizza, more than a decade ago, on account of deep obsession and, ostensibly, free time. Along the way he invented the “pizza upskirt” and was part of a small group of people who set the ground rules for food blogging that are still in effect today. Now he’s running a sold-out pizza pop-up, Margot’s; and he works one shift a week at Paulie Gee’s, the superb Brooklyn pizzeria, in training to franchise it in Portland, Oregon. Of all of the many characters who in one way or another have spent time talking about eating as a matter of profession, Adam is categorically top-5 for me. He is everything that is right about the medium. His tone is razor sharp yet approachable, he's consistent, and he knows what he doesn't know.
BL: So this place is the Keste guys?
AK: I can’t remember exactly how it breaks down. I think Roberto from Keste is up here now and his daughter runs Keste. He was joking — and I don’t even know how old his daughter is, maybe early 20s — [in Kuban’s Italian pizzaiolo accent] “I told her not to follow in my footsteps, but what does she do … ?” He runs it with Antonio Starita, hence Don Antonio. They just opened one in Atlanta, too.
Exactly how much pizza do you eat?
Too much! Probably more than when I was editing Slice, ironically. At least twice a week now. I try to do a weekly pizza lunch, and then I put that up on Instagram with that stupid hashtag, #weeklypizzalunch. At least once a week I try to go out for pizza at a place that I’m either revisiting out of curiosity or a new place. Either it's new because it just opened or I’ve shamefully never been there. So at least twice, because there’s that one time when I go out for lunch, and then at Paulie’s I’ll eat a few slices here and there when I’m working my shift. Sometimes I bring home a shift pie from Paulie’s and I’ll eat maybe half of it.
Do you think about pizza differently than you did ten years ago?
When I started Slice, my notion of pizza was very braggadocious. I think I was trying to prove something. Like, Hey I’m a New Yorker, guys. This was my way of trying to prove some kind of New Yorker cred, I guess. Our pizza’s the best. Fuck that Chicago shit. I think the tagline was, “It’s not deep dish, it’s not Chicago dreck. This is about New York pizza.” Over the years I softened. To be more inclusive in the Serious Eats way, I had to soften a bit on the Chicago thing. Plus, after a while, you just tired of the whole rhetoric.
I look back to the way we talked about restaurants when Eater started and it was fundamentally an outsider publication.
Yeah.
But over the years, by virtue of the fact that we were successful and in the same way you were, I think it moved in the direction of being more insider. But, also, we just knew more more about what we were talking about.
Exactly. When I started I was just some dumb-ass, like, there are a ton of good pizzas in New York. Follow along as I eat through the good ones and keep notes. And then, yeah, slowly, to my surprise, people were like, “Oh, there’s this crazy pizza blog. Cool.” And then pizzeria owners started knowing about it and then when you come you’d become friendly with the owners. It was outsider, nose up against the glass wow this is cool. Then, it was “Hey, you’re from Slice? Let me show you around the kitchen. Let me show you the oven. Hey, do you want to top some pizzas?” It fundamentally changed from being a very personal, off the cuff thing to being more professional.
Do you miss the early days?
I do miss the early days, in a way. With Slice as it is now, there’s less room for personal stories. I would almost say personality, although you can get that through in the writing. For the personal stuff, readers don’t care. In the early days it was very much my blog. I could get away with “Me and E-Rock went to Staten Island. Staten Island’s crazy!”
But it’s an interesting thing. That kind of voice and personality is exactly what made the site successful.
I think that’s what readers connected with, not only on Slice or Hamburger Today or Serious Eats. But, blogs in general. That was what people connected with. That’s why there were blogs and there was the mainstream media. As blogs became more professional, they lost some of that craziness. I miss the early days when you could just get up a post about whatever and just kind of express yourself without really thinking about page views, thinking about SEO, thinking about how it will play on Twitter, if it’s shareable on Facebook … I do miss the sense that you were making it up as you went along. Now there’s a formula to things. There’s a way to do a lifestyle blog. There’s a way to do a recipes blog. You have to have beautiful photos. You have to have giveaways.
Doesn’t that suck?
It does. It is formulaic. It all kind of blends into the same voice. “Look, we have a giveaway from Kitchen-Aid. Fun!” It’s a little sad to see what was once my baby kind of lingering there. Languishing.
Would you buy it back if you had the opportunity?
No. I love it, but that kind of small indie blog just wouldn’t be worth my time. Or my money, unless it was $5. I hate to say that about what I just called my baby, but what value would I get out of it? Advertisers flocking to it? Probably not. It would just be a personal project and I could very well do that on Tumblr or Wordpress and just start a new one. In fact I have Famous Original A, which I barely blog on as it is because—Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare are kind of my distributed blog.
So, speaking of your distributed blog, from what I can tell, you’re not just working at Paulie Gee’s. You’ve dropped hints you’re doing it as a matter of training to open your own.
Basically, Paulie is franchising. He’s not going the normal route. He’s looking for people like me or the guy in Baltimore. Pizza nerds who are passionate about pizza and have this weird pizza dream. With Paulie, what he’s always said is that this is the way he can expand, but still stay in Brooklyn. Hopefully all the people who open one are personable enough to do the Paulie thing. Like, “Hey how are ya? Ya been here before?”
And yours is going to be in Portland.
I lived there for three years after college and fell in love with it. But, I wanted to see what New York was like, so I moved here. I always had in the back of my mind that I would retire to Portland. This wouldn’t be retirement, but like Paulie says, “Ever since I opened this place I never worked a day in my life.”
Where in the apprenticeship are you?
I would say I’m in the middle. For Paulie, he wants to get them opened as soon as he can. I want to train up a little bit more before I get out there. I’m probably 60% of the way there, I think. I can top those pizzas with the best of them. I can stretch the dough now, which turned out to be the hardest part. The oven I thought would probably be the hardest—it is the hardest physically, because you’re in front of the hot oven and you’ve got one hand just about being burnt off.
Basically there are three people on a station. Well four people on the pizza making operation: expeditor, dough stretcher, topper, oven. You’ll have the expeditor calling out the pies that go in the round — we do three to four pizzas a round. The stretcher stretches out three to four rounds of dough, the topper tops them, then the oven guy or girl throws them in, spins them, cooks them. A whole round you could do in three to four minutes—well, let’s say four to five minutes. So, how it works when you’re training you start on toppings. That’s easy enough. You should be able to do toppings no problem after one or two nights. You’ll start out stretching dough when it’s slower. If you get into trouble then they’ll switch you out, throw you back to toppings. With dough, I was constantly thrown back to toppings. With the pizza making on the oven, after a couple of time I could make it through a shift. But I need more practice on that.
It sounds like you’re living the dream.
Yeah.
* * *
Epilogue. I did this interview with Adam in March. It's five months later. By way of update, Adam writes, "I'm actually staying in NYC to open a bar pie place now. In the very early stages — still writing my business plan."
Is There Finally a Next OpenTable Coming? [1 of 2]
Five years ago the big ideas that were drawing entrepreneurs to food were social recommendation engines and data. Now it feels we're talking about souping up the home kitchen and OpenTable killers. The first is one of those obvious targets, the product of changes in style and taste. The latter is interesting, because it's not as if OpenTable has sailed through the last decade competition-free.
Real OpenTable competitors have been few and far between. One of its more interesting foes was, arguably, Groupon. In 2009, restaurants emptied out and Groupon came along to say, again, we can fill your restaurant. But they tweaked the model. The Groupon thinking was, Supply is outstripping demand by a factor of 1000, so we're going to help you lower your price. And when you do, we have the distribution network to sell your lower price to customers. Now it is turning itself into a POS company, because it turns out that daily deals was just a trend.
So why is OpenTable back in the crosshairs of the startup world? The biggest reason is probably because it has a very measurable and very real market cap (for the restaurant world, at least), but here's my guess at two others. First, OpenTable is doing exactly the same thing they were doing in 1999. Today they are in no way leveraging available new technology. The gap between what is technologically possible and what they're offering is a divide that is finally visible to the average customer. (To be fair, they are now starting to try things.) Second, food tech startups have the best access to real capital they've ever had. There are a hundred legit startups across categories from payments to POS, all trying to help restaurants improve their margins—there may be one in the bunch that gets the runway to figure it out.
I think it's exciting times, because if the business model changes for the better, customers win. In 2 of 2, what I'm working on.
In March of 2008, Eater published a little something special called the Zak-O-Matic, one of the great editorial-engineering collaborations of all time. Digging through an ancient drive, I found the worksheet we used for the source code.
// TRON
var HEADLINE_RUBRIC = new Array(
"BREAKING",
"SHOCK",
"DEVELOPING",
"GAME OVER",
"NO BRAINER",
"BLOCKBUSTER",
"OMG"
);
var HEADLINE = new Array(
"Zak Pelaccio Rides Again",
"Pelaccio's Biggest Reveal to Date",
"Pelaccio Back to His Old Tricks",
"Pelaccio's Latest Revealed",
"Zak Pelaccio Secret Shocker Revealed!",
"The Pelaccio Empire Adds One More"
);
var ADJECTIVE = new Array(
"a trendy",
"an old-school",
"a laid-back",
"a hip",
"a pop-up",
"a rustic",
"a hidden",
"a secret",
"a narrow",
"a flirty",
"a multi-level",
"an underground",
"a massive",
"a 700-seat",
"a contemporary",
"a cozy",
"an airy",
"a subterranean",
"a private",
"a combustively creative",
"a McNallyesque",
"a potentially groundbreaking",
"a gastronomically fascinating",
"a no-frills, lo-fi",
"a wickedly entertaining",
"a pungent",
"a hyperlocal",
"a genre-busting",
"a playful",
"a rooftop",
"a game-changing",
"an instantly franchiseable",
"a retro",
"a steamy",
"an in-your-face",
"a continental",
"a Bruni-bait",
"an Eater-38-destined",
"a fast casual"
);
var LOCATION = new Array(
"Dubai",
"Long Island City",
"Madison Square Park",
"The Cloisters",
"the New Yankee Stadium",
"the MePa Apple Store",
"Pier 40",
"Battery Park",
"Harlem",
"the freshly vacated Fr.og space",
"Hoboken",
"Governors Island",
"Staten Island",
"Red Hook",
"the JFK Terminal 4 Food Court",
"Bushwick",
"the Maldives",
"the Bellagio",
"the Water Club at Borgata",
"the back left corner of American Grill",
"the vicinity of WD-50",
"an unmapped Lower East Side byway",
"the mezzanine of the former Wild Salmon space",
"the climate-controlled comfort of his parents' loft in Soho",
"the back garden of the forthcoming Cooper Square Hotel",
"Palazzo Chupi",
"the environs of CitiField",
"the Iron Triangle",
"the former Quilted Giraffe space",
"the space formerly occupied by Gaseteria",
"the North Fork",
"Cherry Grove",
"Roosevelt Island",
"the basement of a Dunkin' Donuts",
"a space Qdoba passed on",
"Jerry Seinfeld's private parking facility",
"the Statue of Liberty's Crown"
);
var TIME = new Array(
"tomorrow",
"by 2012 at the latest",
"by Memorial Day",
"in Summer 2008",
"by Labor Day",
"this fall",
"later this month",
"on November 1, 2009, give or take",
"in 2009",
"just as soon as he can find the right space",
"by dusk",
"any day now",
"as soon as the reality TV crew documenting its construction completes principal photography",
"pending the approval of a full liquor license by Community Board 3 and the SLA",
"on the Fourth of July",
"in time for Super Bowl Sunday",
"only to members",
"on alternate Tuesdays, for the time being",
"in time for the Beijing Olympiad",
"on Frank Bruni's birthday",
"for an extended friends-and-family tryout later this week",
"when Jennifer Baum gives him the go-ahead"
);
document.write("<div class='posttitle' style='margin-bottom: 1em;'>" + re(HEADLINE_RUBRIC) + ": " + re(HEADLINE) + "</div><b>Zak Pelaccio</b> is teaming with <b>" + re(PERSON) + "</b> on " + re(ADJECTIVE) + " " + re(GENRE) + " " + re(RESTAURANT_TYPE) + " in " + re(LOCATION) + ". Pelaccio tells us it'll open " + re(TIME) + ". [EaterWire]");
function re(arr) {
return arr[Math.floor(Math.random() * arr.length)];
}
Kitchensurfing Hacks: 5 Tricks That Will Make Your Burgers Better, No Matter What
You make an insane burger. It’s a vehicle of perfection. I know, I did, too. Then I spent the better part of the last decade tasting burgers, cooking burgers and throwing an annual competition called the Burger Bloodbath (it’s fun; you should come to the next one). I learned some things. I used to think great burgers were about eggs in the ground beef, the most expensive buns I could find, and bacon jam. They’re not. They’re about balance, simplicity, the right combination of ingredients, and, above all else, great cooking technique.
So, here’s this week’s hack. Five tips that’ll make your awesome burgers even better. No matter the design, no matter how good they already are. No matter what.
Five Things Management Can Do for Fans at Yankee Stadium in 2013
In May, I posted "House of Steinbrenner," the gist of which being that win or lose in 2012 (they lost), a decade ago and two decades ago it was exponentially more fun being a Yankees fan than it is today. Mostly because the stadium experience has declined dramatically -- and, not coincidentally, in direct relationship to George Steinbrenner's declining health. That was a somewhat downbeat rant, so now something more constructive. With the heart of the off-season upon us, 5 things the Yankees can do for fans at Yankee Stadium in 2013:
1. Other than via static posted advertisements, don't monetize the in-game experience. Modell's "Gotta Go to Mo's" theme song plays when the Yankees steal a base. It shouldn't. Fans will appreciate keeping the gameplay sacred.
2. Make a concerted effort to fill every seat in the lower deck for every game. This is a big one, because it zeros in on the biggest difference between the new and old stadiums: energy. In the old stadium, you had that famous Yankees fan energy, which could reach a fever pitch even in April, because 1) the three main decks were stacked tightly, amplifying sound; and 2) many of the best seats in the stadium were controlled by long-time fans.
In the new stadium, you have a vastly different configuration in all regards, but it can be fixed if you put more fans closer to the field. Create a program by which premium seat owners can put their seats up for auction, no reserve, 2 hours before the start of the game, say. Opting in to the program could come with a moderately discounted annual season ticket price, or season ticket holders could simply have the resale price debited back to their accounts, or both. (This creates headaches around the all-you-can-eat club level experience, obviously, but there are ways of handling the logistics and the benefit to the stadium and fans vastly outweighs these problems.)
3. Fix the food. The Yankees are the greatest sports franchise in the world in the greatest restaurant city in the world, so why is the food at Yankee Stadium such absolute garbage? If you're not a Legends ticket holder, the best thing to eat in Yankee Stadium is the meatball parm sandwich found at the Parm kiosk in the Great Hall. Said kiosk is maybe 8' wide and it's massively inconvenient to get to if you don't pick something up on the way in (and if anyone really knew about it, the lines would be three innings long). Meanwhile, on offer quite widely: mediocre-at-best sliders, fries, hot dogs, chicken fingers, sausages, pizza and ice cream. Re-trade a couple of vendor contracts, take a modest loss and do something here for fans. For instance, take one of the Premio sausage stands on each level (there are six throughout the ball park) and make it a curated station that features independently operated New York restaurants.
4. Hire a visual design company to completely rethink the graphics experience at the stadium. See Diamond Vision image above for an example of the current approach. It's time for an upgrade to a Yankees-grade graphics package.
5. Start integrating technology in a meaningful way. Follow the Yankees large pool of beat writers on Twitter during a game and you'll have a massively more informed, entertaining game watching experience. Their commentary is excellent, and the Yankees should package it up for average fans. Plus, the media has access to all sorts of stats fans would love to have, too. In the past this would have been a tough ask. In 1996, we manually updated a large packet of statistical info every day, then copied, stapled and distributed it to the media. Today, the process is entirely digital, available via a credentialed online area of MLB.com. There's no reason why fans shouldn't get access in their seats, too, via an in-stadium app.
Skirt Steak, my friend Charlotte Druckman's survey of the state of women in food, is out at the end of the month. Though its express purpose is to see how women chefs, via 73 lady intervivewees, are "standing the heat and staying in the kitchen," it is not nearly that gendered a message. Those seeking to understand food in 2012 must read it. Chapter one is just a spectacular look at how today's chefs are defining themselves, and how much those definitions vary chef to chef, region to region, experience to experience.
There are times when Charlotte lets her panel assign too much blame on men and doesn't force them to take responsibility or consider environmental circumstances beyond sex. I think, for example, women tend to have more trouble with the media not because of a media bias (Chapter 8, "Media Rare"), but because for whatever reason the guys tend to be more proactive, especially in pounding us over the head with their messaging. Or, Amanda Cohen wants to think she lost Iron Chef because of a bias on the panel. That is an absurd delegation of responsibility for several reasons, including the fact that two of the three people on her judging panel were women.
If that is nit-picking, and it is, it shouldn't distract from the many crucial observations made about the food biz and the sharp insight the women of this book have about what they do. There's a discussion of media engagement and an acute understanding of both the good and evil of indie, largely digital, media; how the small guy (or gal) has actually, quietly won; why the most thrilling food is not coming out of French style kitchens, but from more democratic organizations; how there's more empire-building happening than we know; and, just, the West Coast is eating the East Coast for breakfast.
For five years, we've had high concept and low concept burgers. Joey Campanaro once presented a luau burger, complete with pineapple. Lockhart Steele, winner in year one thanks to Dave Chang throwing the whole thing for him, won with meatloaf. Michael White's huge, fatty white label burger got close last year. Wylie Dufrense's seaweed burger with homemade American cheese is my all-time favorite, because it mixed a crazy intellectual idea with a burger that actually just had these incredibly vivid and simple flavors layered exactly right. And, of course, the Momoburger, which is now on the menu at Jeffrey's, won three times and is the most straight forward burger that's ever been in the contest.
And this year's field is in my mind by far the most competitive. The simplest burger this year is Jesse Gerstein's Beach Bacon Burger, which was runner up last year and might have won on better execution (it was over-cooked for the judges). If they were pros it'd be the favorite. I'm calling it Top Three for that burger right now. It's the burger that the judges have in their heads as a great beach burger.
Mullen, Stupak, Mehdi BB and Moore all have a real shot, too. Moore's "Bread & Butter Burger" is the most down-the-middle, and he'll get an edge from the many house made ingredients he's putting in play. If the smoke on Mullen's doesn't prove too novel, it'll place well. That it has the one-slot is absolutely gargantuan. And White's Butterfly Burger is very promising. Mustard, garlic pickles, onion, American cheese is the right idea and a great, simple burger in the 10-slot for judging could be a killer combination. I'm concerned about the BBQ mayo on Mehdi BB's burger, because that flavor profile could be too strong for the six-hole judging slot. Being up at the top helps Stupak in a big way, as refried beans in the middle of the pack might overwhelm the judges.
Solien, repping the Montauk Yacht Club, and Pelaccio with a lamb burger are the long shots. Solien is going high-concept with avocado, provolone and lardo. That's just crazy, but I can't wait to try it. And I don't know that a lamb burger can play, although Pelaccio is a guy who could make it work.
The wild cards this year are Simmons, with her "Montak Super Slider," and Ramsey-Willson, who are amateurs but who have a great concept of short rib, american cheese, a special sauce, and onions, pickled and shaved all on a Martin's. If they get the temps right, they're going to be in the mix. Back to the slider, we've never had a slider the competition and, frankly, I always advise against it. Just doesn't show as well as a half-burger. But she has the 11 hole for judging, so maybe the judges find it a welcome relief having just had 10 other bigger burgers.
With that said, here's the line, in judging order.
While I've got your attention, we've got a few tix left at eater.com/superburger. Tickets will be available at the door while capacity allows for $150 cash money.
We spend a lot of time judging coffee shops by their roasts and pulls and machinery. I'd like to suggest another, equally as important criteria: morning service.
Other than live-in family and, in some cases, overnight guests, those who do not brew coffee at home on the regular also communicate with a coffee shop staffer of some kind post-wake, pre-caffination. It is a delicate window of time for us. I am fragile. So, service is hugely important. Here are a modest few rules of engagement for coffee shop personnel to adopt for the AM rush. The best places do all of this and more, and that's why they're great. Here we go.
1. Remember my order before you remember my name. If you can only remember one of the two, please make it my order. See #2, as I am deeply invested in you knowing my order. The best job anyone has ever done with this is at the Starbucks at the entrance to 30 Rock from the subway (there are a few Starbuckses in the Rockefeller Center concourse, and all but this one are total garbage, so I want to be clear). The AM manager knows names and orders and calls them into the baristas as his customers walk in. It took him six days to get my name and order down. The in-store experience is so painless that I was willing to drink Starbucks coffee just to get it.
2. The goal is for you to create a situation for me wherein I can say as few words as possible if I don't want to chit-chat I shouldn't be made to feel like a dick for that. When all I have to say is, "Yes, thanks," you, sweet person behind the counter, are crushing it.
3. If you really, really know what you're doing, maybe I don't even have to say that? I used to live a block from Joe on Waverly. When lines got long, Jonathan would scan the line for regulars, cup their drinks and bring them out on the house. Though certainly above and beyond the call, this is how to breed loyalty.
4. As a barista, you, too, can know my drink and help a brother out. They're very good at this at Blue Bottle in Chelsea, where it's a Yes, Thanks situation because the baristas tell the cashiers what to ring up as they're getting it ready for me.
5. Please, God, don't be annoying. This is a big one. At Le Pain Quotidien, there's a server, Michaelangelo, who asks me what my name is every time he rings me up. This morning, he also had to pour my coffee twice because he spilled the first one. While bagging another customer's croissant he warned, "be careful where you throw out that plastic bag, because the animals are in danger." Worst case scenario all around.
6. Keep in mind that the less time I spend handling coffee shop ops the better. It's not because I don't love the shop -- I do love the shop -- it's because I'm not equipped to deal with people before I've had my coffee (many would argue I'm generally ill-equipped to deal with people) and I may be running late, too. Don't let the line slow down, don't wait for a credit card to run before taking the next person's order, don't run out of lids for the coffee cups, don't have a sidebar with someone else behind the counter about what you did last night and how you're hungover.
Yes, thanks.
UPDATE: Cole McBride makes the To Each His Own point: "@benleventhal I know many customers that want this same experience as you in the morning but I also know that that's not for everyone." I agree, but would add that staffers should read customers and let them dictate, not the other way around. I tip well and am cordial and in exchange if I want to talk less that should be ok. Also I would emphasize these are suggestions for the morning rush, which we could define as opening until 9:45 AM, if that makes anyone more comfortable.
UPDATE 2: A particular morning provoked me into putting pen to paper on this topic, but let me add that I mostly have great experiences with specialty coffee shops and that my issue is mainly with places like most Starbucks and Le Pain Quotidiens, such as the one on Lexington and 64th that currently has me by the balls. Joe, Blue Bottle, Jack's, and Mud Truck have all been regular stops for me over the years and staffers at those places are invariably a pleasure. xo, BL
A very limited number of friends & family tix are quietly on sale now at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3837325544?nomo=1. Password is "superburger." Public on-sale next week, exclusively at eater.com. Get at it.
###
(MONTAUK) SUPERBURGER
8/25/12, 1 PM
Featuring
THE BURGER JOINT & MOMOFUKU MILK BAR
Sponsors
Amstel Light and LaFrieda Meats
Competitors
SEAMUS MULLEN, Tertulia
JESSE GERSTEIN & DAN ALDWORTH, 2011 Superburger Runner-up (a)
ALEX STUPAK, Empellon
ZAK PELACCIO, Fatty Crab
EDDIE "HARLEM" HUANG & CHARLIE DOUGIELO, BaoHaus
RYAN SOLIEN, Montauk Yacht Club
HAROLD MOORE, Commerce
MEHDI BRUNET-BENKRITLY, Fedora
MIKE DEFONZO, PJ Clarke's
SARAH SIMMONS, City Grit (a)
JAMES RAMSAY & STU “THE GRIFTER” WILSON (a)
Judges
PAT LAFRIEDA, LaFrieda Meat Purveyors
SPIKE MENDELSOHN, 2009 South Beach Burger Bash Winner
JOSH CAPON, 2010 NYC Burger Bash Winner
HEAD JUDGE KATE KRADER, Food & Wine Magazine
LEE "THE RING" SCHRAGER, NYC/South Beach Wine & Food Festivals
The Greatest Pop Culture Trivia Question in History
Between 1970 and 2000, the same subject appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Time and Newsweek in the same week. An animal, a team, a woman and two men. Who are they?
