A Burger with Topping
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IN THIS ISSUE: Celebrating matrimony BYOB-style, celebrating 4/20 a day late (appropriate), celebrating ramp season with Shanghai-style noodles, and celebrating issue XXX with Bareburger after dark.
Appetizers
Eats Shoots and Leaves
Last week I emerged from my favorite ramp patch in the woods with a heaving sack of that stanky green good-good and, blessedly, not a single tick bite. (Before anyone comes for me: yes, I only harvested the leaves. I never feel like digging around in the dirt for the bulbs, anyway.) Most of this haul was destined for various preservation projects—blended into butter, fermented like sauerkraut—with a few generous handfuls set aside for more immediate gratification.
I decided to try out a recipe for cong you ban mian—Shanghai-style scallion oil noodles—from The Woks of Life, substituting a fine chiffonade of ramps for the julienned scallions. It worked a treat. At first I was worried that the thinly sliced greens wouldn’t crisp up in the hot oil properly, but when the bubbling had subsided and I poured the mixture through a strainer, I was rewarded with a crunchy, dark emerald tangle that called to mind kizami nori. I briefly simmered the pungent infused oil with dark and light soy sauce and sugar to create a sauce for the noodles and crowned each of our bowls with great tufts of delicate frizzled ramps. Spring has sprung! —A.B.S.
Wedding Wine
Killing time before a wedding this past weekend, fellow guest Ryan Kailath pitched me on a novel idea: should we bring a few bottles of our own wine? I was taken aback, but he’d apparently done it before. Even when the bride and groom have excellent taste, the reality of serving a hundred-plus at a wedding venue inevitably means a limited selection.
We found a local wine shop and landed on three bottles, chilled in the hotel minifridge and still cold in their tote after the ceremony and cocktail hour had passed. The strangers at Table Twelve, first scandalized when the contraband made its debut, soon got into the spirit of our secret wine club: nothing breaks the ice like becoming co-conspirators in a social misdemeanor. —S.D.
About Yesterday
A day late, but it's high time that we acknowledge it: the official position of Gourmet magazine is that cooking with weed is silly. The more elevated, the more annoying. Carveouts exist—making boxed brownies goosed with homemade ganja butter for your coop-mates is great, and this coop may someday partake. But let’s stop trying to make cannabis “cuisine.” The world does not want or need reefer-infused bonbons/cacio e pepe/asparagus foam. Of this particular variety of cheeba chicanery we say: ILLEGALIZE IT! —A.B.S.
A Burger with Topping
The burger bistro concept is stagnating—why not go gay?
It takes a village to transform the Bareburger on 46th Street in Hell’s Kitchen into a gay nightclub. A mustachioed D.J. wearing a Janet Jackson tee is in the back setting up his station. Two men in leather harnesses are flitting around, every so often doing a little twirl or twerk to the Katy Perry or Lady Gaga remixes coming out of the speakers. Servers are whisking away tables to make more standing room. Others are putting posters on the wall of men wearing PUMP! underwear. The smell of oil and beef permeates the space, since it is still a burger restaurant.
The seventeen-year-old chain generally isn’t known for debauchery, but this location is trying something different.
The party is called “Smash N’ Mash,” and its promo poster promised two go-go dancers—Markiie and Danny J—as well as D.J. Gadget, over a Photoshopped tableau of four bare-chested and built men striking various poses. As a journalist I’m supposed to show not tell, but in this case I think I’ll just tell you: the poster is advertising what is clearly a gay (sex?) party—probably for bears.
You may be wondering how I got here. A better question: how did Bareburger, the bistro chain with some thirty locations around the country, get here?
To answer the first question: a few weeks ago at my local watering hole in Ridgewood, Queens, I met a fledgling drag queen. This person told me they had a new show in Manhattan. Where? I asked. Bareburger, they replied. Bareburger!? I gasped back. Yes, my source went on. The Hell’s Kitchen location was moonlighting as a nightlife hotspot during the weekends, specifically for the gays. Allegedly, they even turn one alcove into a dark room (that is, a dimly-lit private space for people to do…things one might not expect to see at a Bareburger).
This seemed too funny to be true; I assumed I was being told a bald-faced lie. I knew Bareburger to be a somewhat forgettable burger chain, a place where, in the early twenty-teens, I had gone on some dates. Most of these dates were also forgettable, and I think I would have remembered if the venue was raring to host an orgy. But a search on Instagram showed that the story checked out: there was an account called gay4bareburger showcasing upcoming parties, all queer-themed, at the Hell’s Kitchen location. The events ranged from karaoke (queeraoke) and dyke drag brunch to something unclear called “Heifer Club.” I faced a choice: either not go and think about this insane pivot constantly, or make the interminable 40-minute journey all the way to Hell’s Kitchen.
But in digging into this chain restaurant franchise’s seemingly inexplicable heel-turn, I discovered it was just one of the more eccentric signs of an industry in the middle of an identity crisis.
Bareburger, launched in 2009, was part of a rising wave of slightly upscale burger chains that followed the explosive fast-casual growth of Chipotle in the early aughts: L.A.-based Umami Burger offered parmesan crisps and burgers made even beefier thanks to unique additions like mushroom powder; Five Guys promised quote-unquote fresh ingredients, freezer-free locations, and mountains of fries (Five Guys first opened in Virginia in the ’80s, but only really grew once it began franchising in 2003); Shake Shack’s early days had Pat LaFrieda beef and Midwest-homage concretes. Bareburger’s pitch was twofold: its ingredients were “bare,” as in organic, sans pesticides, hormones, and other additives, and it offered meats beyond mere beef, from elk to ostrich to wild boar (it also made a solid veggie burger, which was a real plus for me back in the day).
The restaurant first opened in Astoria, Queens, but it quickly expanded to other parts of New York City, then spread to Chicago, Santa Monica, and Atlanta. By 2019, there were over 40 Bareburger locations, including spots in Tokyo and Dubai. But it never hit the escape velocity of Shake Shack’s 400 locations, let alone Five Guys’ 1,500-plus. The good times have not quite continued to roll since that peak. Covid transformed the way people dined—not to mention, the allure of a fancy burger is no longer quite what it was in 2013. Some competitors have really felt the bite: Umami Burger owner Adam Fleischman told the New Yorker in 2011 that the business had “the potential to be a McDonald’s,” and by 2017 it had over 25 locations internationally. But the following year it began closing up locations in New York and Florida, and today the only remaining U.S. outpost seems to be hidden in LAX. (Some Umami Burgers in Japan still appear to be chugging along.) Bareburger, by contrast, has just pared things back. It closed most of its locations outside of the tristate area, bringing its count down to around 30. It’s also trying to get with the times; last summer, it launched a new concept called Smash Club, seemingly retrofitting one of its New York locations into a smashburger restaurant.
Another way to spice things up, it turns out, is to go gay.
The person orchestrating Bareburger’s coming out is Dave Dausch, an Astoria fixture most well known for Dave’s Lesbian Bar. The actual Lesbian Bar has yet to open, but Dausch and their concept have hosted dozens of queer parties and mutual aid events in the Queens neighborhood over the last five years.
At the Hell’s Kitchen Bareburger, Dausch is wearing a blue flannel collared shirt and jeans and flitting around giving orders to staff—“They are sitting at a dirty table!” I hear Dausch tell a server, pointing to a group of six toward the front—while setting up various stations for the night’s festivities. I approach Dausch while they’re putting lube, condoms, and other paraphernalia onto a tray.
They had seen my group perusing the food options and said to me with a smirk, “We’re going to get a bottom-friendly menu soon.” I inquire about what that means, and Dausch responds, “We want to have something that’s a little friendly for if you want to maybe use your butt.” Roger that.
How this all began, Dausch tells me, is that the cofounder and CEO of Bareburger, Euripides Pelekanos, met Dausch through Dave’s Lesbian Bar community events and approached them with a proposal: “I think that this restaurant would do well with gay programming if you want to do it.” How could Dausch say no? The music is getting louder, and I want to press on with questions about who and why and what, but Dausch is busy filling up a lube station, and I respect that some things are more urgent than talking to me.
We order two smashburgers—one single, one double—fries, and chicken tenders. The fabulous bartender Sheldon, wearing a skin-tight black mesh shirt, recommends how best to order the tenders (plain, with sauces on the side), and I appreciate the guidance. Then, to get even more into the Hell’s Kitchen spirit, we order some vodka Red Bulls while we wait for our food.
By now the lights have dimmed, and the go-gos are twerking on the bar. D.J. Gadget is feeling the music. But the party isn’t packed. There are a few tables with groups, some wearing leather-forward outfits, clearly here to party. Others, not so much. Sitting at the bar is a woman in a black tank top next to a firmly straight-looking man wearing a Jalen Brunson jersey. The guy tells me he used to work here and just wanted to see the vibe. (He and the woman leave not long after this conversation.) Only a few minutes earlier, the two televisions above the bar were playing a basketball game and what appeared to be a period film starring Woody Harrelson. Now one shows a commercial for PUMP! underwear on loop, featuring chiseled hairless men on the beach, and the other has someone’s screenshared Instagram “For You” page infinitely scrolling through some of the gayest posts I’ve ever seen.
I sidle up to three women sitting and eating burgers. They’re visiting New York, two from Florida and one from Connecticut, for the literary event BookCon down the street at the Javits Center. Two of them are vegan, and that veggie burger must still be solid, because they’ve come for dinner two nights in a row. “We came here yesterday, and the food was so good!” said one of the women, adding that Friday’s queeraoke was also fun. I have the pleasure of explaining to them that this Bareburger is not like the others. “This is a chain that’s not gay,” I say, to which all three respond in union, “Ohhh???”
Despite some patrons who are still here for the burgers, this party is undeniably very, very gay. Next to D.J. Gadget’s booth is a tray with four different types of poppers available for the sniffing so long as you use a Q.R. code to Venmo an unknown entity four bucks a pop. A friend buys my whole group a round. Things get wobbly for a minute, and then our food arrives. We don’t do restaurant reviews at Gourmet, and we are decidedly neutral on popper aperitivo hour, but I will tell you that the general consensus was that the smashburgers were keepers. Full of beef and fries, we venture into the dark room. It’s upstairs in another dining section overlooking the entire restaurant. It is indeed dark. The first thing we see is another tray with condoms, lube, drug test kits, and rubber gloves. No one is there. And even if someone was, Berghain rules of discretion apply.
It’s now nearing midnight; Dausch and the go-gos are outside trying to beckon people in. Sure, this isn’t a rager, but the music is good, the vibes are fun! It’s early days—who knows, maybe Bareburger will become the next Basement. Still, we depart.
The next day I track down Pelekanos’s cell phone number, and he shockingly calls me back after I leave a voicemail.
“New York is a crazy place right now,” Pelekanos explains. “We’ve had Bareburger for fifteen years—so much weird stuff [has happened] in the city, especially since Covid. Maybe ten years ago, I wouldn’t have done this. The world has changed, you have to let loose.”
Before opening Bareburger in 2009, Pelekanos owned a club in Bed-Stuy called Sputnik. “We did a lot of fun parties—big gay and lesbian parties,” he says. “I’ve always had a great affinity and love for the community.”
After he had seen some of Dausch’s parties in Astoria and become friends with them, the idea slowly materialized that the Hell’s Kitchen location could be a prime venue for some queer experimentation. The Bareburger team decided to reach out to Dausch to see if they’d be interested in promoting some parties. “It’s a huge gay community; we have a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen,” he reasoned.
“A lot of the gay bars have closed, and people are looking for a place,” Pelekanos tells me. Dausch has apparently pitched him on turning Bareburger into a late-night diner-slash-bar every night of the week during Pride. “The world changes, restaurants change, trends change,” he says. “[Late-night establishments] have slowly been dying away, but maybe there’s a chance to do something special and bring that back.”
Still there are risks. Bareburger, before 9 p.m. on Saturdays, is a family-friendly establishment a stone's throw from Times Square and dozens of Broadway theaters. “You’re going to get tourists that come and say, ‘What’s going on there?’ They come in with their kids and see a very different vibe…people might roll their eyes and leave,” he says. On the other hand, “some people might find it cool and stay.” (Indeed, on Saturday, we watched a family of six walk from the back to the front while the party was hopping; they didn’t seem angry, but they also didn’t seem to really understand what was going on.)
I ask if this could become a new thing—if the Hell’s Kitchen gay concept works out, what’s stopping Bareburger from going full-fledged gay everywhere? Pelekanos thinks. “It depends on the neighborhood,” he says. “If I ever open in Utah, I might make it a Mormon Bareburger. Who knows!”
Cale Guthrie Weissman is a worker-owner of Gourmet.
NEXT ISSUE: Slip (croutons and crudités) into a hot bath (of garlic and anchovies).