Where's the beef?
Volunteers in a blind taste test reveal the People’s Best Burger
By Kawehi Haug
Advertiser Entertainment Writer
April 16, 20098 comments | Add Your Own
(Credit: Norman Shapiro - The Honolulu Advertiser)
- Photos:
Had I known going into it that an otherwise routine assignment to review a restaurant — in this case, the new gourmet burger restaurant known as The Counter — would land me in a world of trouble with Honolulu burger lovers, I might have suggested that a less opinionated writer do the review.
In the March 6 review, I had the audacity to suggest that The Counter, a build-your-own burger franchise owned by a few people — including local restaurateur D.K. Kodama and “Lost” actor Daniel Dae Kim — makes the best burgers in town.
And then came the backlash.
My e-mail inbox exploded with emotionally charged messages that screamed (almost literally) burger treason, and the online version of the story now has a 16-page appendix of readers’ comments, about 98 percent of which are aimed at pointing out my glaring ignorance with regard to beef and buns.
A small sampling:
ParadiseLost2 wrote: “I don’t care how good the burger is, I’m not waiting an hour to get one! Besides there are other places that serve great burgers, Teddy’s and Kua 'Aina jump to mind. All you fad foodies keep going to The Counter, less crowded at Kua 'Aina for me!”
pineapple123: “Teddy’s Bigger Burgers has the best burgers hands down!!!!! Honolulu advertiser — What were you thinking????”
tpulu: “… I would rate The Counter in the top 5 of best burger ‘tasting’ joints. Not at all the best. And it is a matter of individual taste buds because my wife who makes a living off of eating, still thinks the whopper is better (than) the counter.”
diamondheader: “What a shameless piece of ‘reporting.’ This place is not even in my top ten. Paid $35 for 2 burgers with fries, no drinks. Average quality — bad overall experience. Never again!”
From hwndomer: “As much as I disagree with Kawehi on this one, she did do one thing successfully in this article. … She convinced me to head out and buy a burger. Teddy’s here I come!”
The burger wars
I’m not going to lie: In the aftermath of the backlash, I thought that I might have been too hasty in declaring The Counter’s burgers the best. How could ALL these people be wrong?
So, I went back to The Counter and also revisited the other places that are considered to have good burgers.
I still stand by my claim.
I also realized the commenters weren’t wrong. And I’m not wrong. Or right. At the risk of sounding like an after-school special, we’re just … different.
Operating from the premise that a food critic’s best burger isn’t necessarily the people’s best burger, I decided the best way to follow up my review is to find the People’s Best Burger.
I asked for volunteers to participate in a blind tasting of burgers from five of the most popular burger joints on the island. The only requirement for participation was that the tasters had to disagree with my claim about The Counter. I spent two days fielding e-mails from more than 100 willing beef eaters, and finally settled on five tasters.
The Honolulu Advertiser Burger Wars took place on April 2; here’s how it all went down.
The tasting
Gathered at 5:30 p.m. in a conference room at The Honolulu Advertiser building, our five tasters took their jobs very seriously. During the actual tasting, the silence was almost unsettling. No one spoke, or even made any of the noises normally associated with eating. Walking into the tasting room was like walking into a room full of people sitting for their SATs.
Taster Tom Frigge would tear off a chunk of bread before taking his first bite, rolling it and crumbling it between his fingers to get a sense of the texture.
Our only female participant, Shelli Stein, would smell her burger first. Then pause. Then one more sniff. Then bite. Then she’d chew, but very slowly. She had warned us that she had a “very picky burger palate,” and she wasn’t kidding.
Geoff Milford did a 12-year stint as a professional chef at a burger place in California, and he was our one-bite-wonder — one bite was all he needed to know where a burger ranked on his taste scale.
But Dan Suehisa was the only one who had the foresight to bring along a container for his leftovers.
The results
Nothing about this little experiment was scientific by any means. This was a small group of burger lovers getting together, eating a few burgers and giving us their honest opinions. And they definitely had their opinions:
• Three of our five tasters picked The Counter as their favorite burger of the bunch, with one person not being able to choose between The Counter and Teddy’s, giving both restaurants the same high score.
On a scale of one to five, with 1 being “I’d never pay for a burger like this” and 5 being “I’d gladly eat this every day, I like it so much,” The Counter burger received four ratings of 4.
• Our lone guy out, Milford, picked Kua 'Aina as his favorite, which he said came as no surprise to him.
• The group’s least favorite burger, receiving across-the-board ratings of 2 out of 5, was the Burgers on the Edge burger.
• Kua 'Aina’s burger came in second place, receiving one rating of 4, two 3s and a 2.
• Teddy’s was a close third, receiving one 4, one 3, one 2 and two 1s.
• W&M’s burger was as popular as it was unpopular. Being an old-time diner-style burger, we didn’t really expect it to be able to compete with other bigger burgers, but it is beloved by so many people (including us), that we had to add it into the mix.
So there it is. The People’s Best Burger. Or at least these people’s choice for best burger out the five burgers we gave them. It’s not quite the same as saying The Counter makes the best burgers on the island, but it’s good enough for me. Plus, we had a good time. If the consensus had been that The Counter’s burger was a tasteless waste of money, I would have walked away happy. And then seriously reconsidered giving up my job as a food writer.
I'm not upset that Tiki's wasn't selected as having the best burger, considering that many people don't even know that we have food, let alone burgers on our lunch and bar menu. But had they tried Tiki's burger in this test, I think they would have ranked it right up there with the best of them. Tiki's burgers rock!