The premier Brooklyn Steakhouse, perennially rated as the top steakhouse in all of NYC also serves up one of the city's best burgers. It's so special, they only serve it during lunch hours (until 3:45pm) and you'll most likely need to get a reservation well in advance to eat there. I've been fortunate enough to be greeted by a little old lady at the hostess counter each time I've visited. She's awesome. Tell her DJ says hi.A little advice if you are making your first trip to Peter Luger's:
1 - Try, no TRY the bacon. Get it as an app, eat if while you wait for the burger to be cooked.
2 - Do not get a 2nd bacon on your burger after having tried it and liked it. Trust me, I'm right.
3 - If you skip the bacon as an app, do get it with your burger. Eat it alone. Savor it. Chances are it will be the highlight of your meal.
Before I go further, when I say app, I mean appetizer. I'm not talking about something you can play with on your iPhone or Droid so just leave the app-store now since there's no such thing as a Peter Luger Bacon App. Nor should there be.Holy Pig Fat Batman, look at that bacon!!!
Moving on, going here for a burger may sound like sacrilege to the steak lovers out there but not going here for a burger IS sacrilege to all the burger lovers out there.
This is a MUST if you are craving a big, juicy burger. Now, all this praise does not go without some negativity. If there's a knock on Luger's, it's simple. They seem to cook the burger(s) however they want to cook them. In my most recent visit, we were a party of 5 (minus Neve Campbell) and 2 of us ordered our burgers to be cooked rare, the others ranged from medium rare to something more cooked.The little plastic cow said my burger was rare and that little plastic cow was not lying. Unfortunately the little plastic cow on my friend's burger that said medium was not medium.
Let's just say there were 5 rare burgers on the table at the time of delivery. It's so disheartening that their cooking of what would arguably be THE burger in all of NYC is so lax that it hurts the overall rating. I compare this to seeing your dream girl and then finally asking her out only to find out that she was born a dude. "She's" taking web design classes by day and did just buy a webcam to make some extra money to speed along the process to become a real-live girl but "she's" just not quite what you wanted now that you've got "her."
Rating - 4/5. If I just graded this on my experience, it's a 5. The meat just tastes so good, the bun perfect, and the slice of raw onion is really all you need. But the cooking errors are just abundant. I grew up in BK and know the FU attitude that BK has but I aint rolling over and handing out grades based on that FU BK charm.
Oh and I did NOT order a cheeseburger but they made me one anyway. Thanks but I was trying to keep Kosher.
A coworker and I were hosting visitors from Texas a couple years back. My colleague got the bright idea to show them that we could get great steaks locally, too. So we hop in a couple SUV's and make the trek from Red Bank up to the BK (why we didn't just get hearty steaks at What's Your Beef in Rumson is beyond me), to visit the world famous Peter Luger steakhouse. We are with someone who was a vegetarian.. so that was fun. And of couse get talked into the bacon (I'll give PL that... the bacon was in fact outstanding), and the steak-for-five, with Peter Luger sauce.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the PL sauce just tasted like sad cocktail sauce to me -- I don't get the appeal. The real sadness was the steak however. It's truly baffling how a steak can be simultaneously bloody and overcooked. It's like it was cooked for a split-second on the surface of the sun. I understand it's probably difficult to cook a piece of meat of that girth, but that's why we go to the experts.
It's interesting to see a good review for the burger, since I'd never step foot in there again, but I'm vindicated by your complaints on the random doneness.
Great points Jason. Luger's sauce is definitely cocktail sauce with something that has watered it down to reach it's consistency. Nobody ever has agreed w/me on that one but I question their taste buds. I do enjoy the sauce but that's neither here nor there.
ReplyDeleteMy positive for the burger is the fact that I don't want it cooked all that much. Granted, if I asked for medium and got the rare slab of beef that I was presented it with, I'd have been disappointed. The fact that they can't seem to get their cooking straight, EVER, is beyond me.
They do have that reputation but I'm not 100% sure how they're able to get away with it.