Last week I walked by this joint and realized that I still hadn’t eaten there. It’s close to my office, so I figured I’d come back soon to try.
So this week I ordered their Burger Heaven burger for delivery. For $16 it comes with fries and coleslaw, and is topped with their special sauce, caramelized onions, lettuce, tomato and American cheese. Sounded like a pretty good deal to me.
Here’s what it looked like when it arrived:
In a span of about three streets, it managed to get almost completely fucking mangled into an incomprehensible mess. After some tinkering, wiping, stacking and organizing, I managed a halfway decent reassembly. See below:
I ordered medium. Not quite:
The meat lacked seasoning, the cheese was over-melted to the point where I know that their griddle probably retained the majority of it (the cheese likely having slid off during the melting process), and the onions completely overpowered the flavor of the meat and ultimately ruined the burger. Whatever they cooked the onions in was bitter-sweet, dark red in color, and completely sucked.
Their special sauce was a thousand island dressing type of deal, which is fine on its own, but this crap went way the fuck overboard with the relish and diced red pepper in the mix. It was hideous; too overpowering in the “sweet pickles” flavor department. Ugh.
I also ticked off the “pickles” box on my order form, expecting them to be ON the burger. Instead I got a single soggy, super sour pickle spear in a plastic bag on the side. Oh well.
In retrospect I probably should have just ordered their classic cheeseburger for $10 (without fries), but it seemed like a bunch of bullshit that this place was then going to charge me $1.25 for lettuce and tomato. So I opted for their namesake burger.
Thoroughly disappointed, I moved on the the equally dreadful french “fries.” I put “fries” in quotes here, because I typically associate fried items with crunch, not sog. Every fry was limp and soggy, mushy: like a 90-year old man’s non-functioning skin-sock. Look at these pathetic fucking things:
Part of this could be the fact that the food was transported in a closed tin, which was then stuffed haphazardly into a closed paper bag, which was then tossed into a plastic bag with reckless abandon, and then slogged over three streets to its demise by someone who gets paid so little that they could not possibly give any fewer shits as to whether the product actually satisfies the ultimate customer.
As for the coleslaw? Watery bullshit. I have a thing with coleslaw anyway. Feel free to listen to this episode of the Hungry Dad’s podcast (at 00:17:40 – 00:20:22), where I explain my aversion to a specific style of coleslaw… Anyway, I took two bites just to try it, but as I suspected, it was pure, unadulterated garbage.
So to sum this up for you burger enthusiasts: Skip this place. Burger Heaven? No… More like Burger Hell (had to do it).
BURGER HEAVEN
9 E 53rd St
New York, NY 10022
