A few years ago, celebrity chef Daniel Boulud introduced to New York a $47 hamburger made from ground Kobe beef wrapped around short ribs, with black truffles and foie gras on top, and served in a Parmesan-crusted bun. As a bonus, you also got a paper cone filled with pommes soufflé: hollow, spherical, golden-fried potatoes that are the hardest of all potato dishes to prepare.
Bill Grimes, recently departed New York Times restaurant critic, said it best. After a lengthy description of this sandwich, he dismissed it by saying, "Bravo, and so what."
But a trend had been started, and it was only a matter of time before this strange uber-burger did the transcontinental two-step and showed up in Vegas. Now it has, at the spiffy new Burger Bar, in the still under-trafficked Mandalay Place, a sky- bridge mall linking Luxor with Mandalay Bay.
Actually, the burger I'm discussing is a little different than Boulud's, being that it was conceived by Hubert Keller, an Alsatian French chef whose Fleur de Lys in San Francisco will be expanding soon in Mandalay Bay.
Keller's burger, the Rossini, actually one-ups the Big Apple in price at $60, but you don't get the pommes soufflé. It also is Kobe beef (wagyu beef from Oregon), foie gras and black truffles, with a shot of Madeira sauce on an onion bun. Dare I say this is a good burger, but I like it better without the foie gras and truffles? Not that they are bad, but on top of a hamburger, it's hard to taste much other than ketchup.
Keller's Burger Bar is a high-concept joint, where meats are ground to order in a rear butcher shop from a variety of proteins like lamb, turkey, salmon, tuna, or of course, beef of varying provenance, such as Black Angus, Kobe and Smithfield Farms.
A host of add-ons make the possibilities for your completed sandwich roughly as large as the integer that encompasses seven-digit prime numbers. Want a lamb burger with brown gravy, beetroot pickle and caramelized onions? OK. How about an organic vegetarian burger with green asparagus, chopped dill, sour cream and pesto? No problem. You get the idea.
Toppings come from compartmentalized sections of the menu, with names like "The Farm," "The Ocean" and "The Earth," the last being mushrooms. Is it a coincidence that a newly opened section of Mandalay Bay calls itself The Hotel? I think not.
Keller is clever enough to know that not everyone wants a burger, so he's included a few entrée salads, some special sandwiches, and a few swell desserts, including the trompe l'oeil Burger Bar Special Sweet Burger, a glazed doughnut with a mock patty of chocolate ganache and a faux slice of American cheese that turns out to be mango gelee.
There is, for instance, a workmanlike Greek salad with feta cheese, Kalamata olives and eggplant confit fighting for space with the lettuce, and an interesting sandwich called the Nordic, made with a king salmon steak, smoked salmon, sour cream, dill and red onions, which tastes for all the world like Sweden itself.
This also is quite a handsome place, a long, deep space with two, count 'em, counters, wood-paneled walls, and booths where tiny TVs play positively weird '50s videos, forcing you to realize how strange postwar America was.
It all works, other than the fact that there is French's mustard on the table, the worst American mustard by far. Ask nice and the waiters will bring you some Dijon. Honestly, Hubert, you should know better.
As cute as the Sweet Burger is, I recommend you take dessert next door, at an even cuter venue called The Chocolate Swan. A dessert bar from Elm Grove, Wisconsin, it serves frozen custard, hellaciously good candies, a variety of homemade pastries, and Peet's Coffee from Berkeley, California; to my view, the best coffee in the West.
The frozen custard, basically an ice cream recipe made with eggs, is popular in Wisconsin, and comes in deliciously rich flavors like raspberry chocolate, cookies and cream, and several others. My favorite pastries here are the dessert bars, stuff like oatmeal date and peanut butter and shortbread pecan, dense, penetratingly sweet fare that you usually have to eat at someone's home.
It's an all-American food fest at Mandalay Place and I can't wait to go back.