Marlowe

publish Part of a series on The best burger in the bay area.

A pretty upscale restaurant (think Spruce but smaller and a tad less fancy in pretty much every capacity) in Soma. Went here 2023-05-22 to try the burger so good that Eater wrote an article about it.

TL;DR: Pretty disappointing, $25 for a 6/10 burger; it’s really difficult to not rate this lower based on its absurd price alone. Fries were included at least.

The ingredients were as follows:

• Cheddar
• Bacon
• Caramelized onions (+0.5 unusualness)
• Lettuce
• No tomato
• Horseradish aioli (+1 unusualness)
• Patty that might have been a blend of lamb meat but I didn’t taste any? (+0)

The burger tasted fine. I just kept running into nitpicks. Overall the burger tasted like a normal unseasoned sandwich. Tomato would have gone a long way because there were no punctual flavors to hold the dish together aside from the horseradish aioli — a cool idea, but in practice too overwhelming for me. One bite would have no horseradish and fall completely flat. The next would have too much, overpowering the weak savory flavor of the patty.

Eating the fries with the side of horseradish aioli kind of had the same effect: the aioli tasted nice, but left zero room for the salty notes in the fries. It just tasted like wasabi mayonnaise dip, in a not-so-great way.

The bacon fell flat too. It was dry, not crispy, and while I didn’t mind the texture it provided it didn’t really add anything. It wasn’t savory. If the bacon were removed I’d score this burger the same. Sharon, someone who typically likes bacon on burgers, thought the bacon was too dry.

The bun was unbuttered and unremarkable too.

As I finished the burger I felt that eating it with ketchup would have fixed many of my issues with it. Sweetness is an overpowering taste too, so having that alongside the horseradish aioli may have harmonized well.

I love the idea of a horseradish aioli but the execution here feels too messy to rate higher than a 6/10.