Balboa Cafe

Upscale bar in the Marina. The burger is called “Balboa burger on a baguette”.

Original price was $19 but I got it with Swiss and mushrooms which were +$2 each, for $23 total.

Unusualness calculation = 1.5:

Overall I’d give it a 6.75/10. It isn’t quite as good as Chez Maman, which also uses European bread.

Things I liked:

Meat was juicy and cooked medium rare.
Bread was a great addition texture-wise.
- Could be crispier
- Could be ever so slightly thinner
- I still liked it.
Housemade pickles and onions added good acidity, which went well with the savoriness

Things that were just OK:

The burger came disassembled, so you have to add the ingredients by hand and get all messy. I guess theoretically this preserves the texture best, and Spruce did it too which I like, but I wanted to just eat my burger today blah.
Burger is verrry close to violating Warren’s long burgers…
- I could fit the whole thing in my mouth but barely
- First 2-3 bites didn’t have all the flavors.
Mushrooms were instrumental in me liking it, I think they contributed probably +0.5pts or so.
- Which is a bummer that they were an optional add-on.

Things I disliked:

Burger was missing a refreshing cold punch-y taste.
- Tomato would have filled this gap perfectly.
- Idk why they didn’t add more?
Butter lettuce was a bad choice texturally, and they didn’t give much of it
- Iceberg would have matched the texture better.
- There wasn’t enough butter lettuce to have many layers of it in the sandwich; it was too thin to be detectable
Burger size doesn’t match baguette size:
- If they solved this issue by expanding the patty, I’d rate it like +0.5-1pts.
- Seems like a hard problem to solve though.

Burger came with free fries which was nice.

Perdicis Notes