Night at the Burger Museum

So here was a fun thing: "Night at the Burger Museum," organized and hosted by Burger Beast a/k/a Sef Gonzalez.

Most folks know Burger Beast as a passionate and voracious blogger of burgers and other comfort foods, or maybe as the organizer of record setting food truck events. Not as many may appreciate that he is also a true historian of the fast food universe, with an encyclopedic depth of knowledge about the genre and its origins. (He's got a book coming out, "All About the Burger," in a few months). Sef has also compiled quite the collection of artifacts and memorabilia, which was first kept in a warehouse in Westchester I visited a couple years ago. It now has a home at the Burger Museum in Magic City Casino, where you can find Bob’s Big Boy hobnobbing with Officer Big Mac.

Earlier this week, Sef launched something new there: Night at the Burger Museum, with the space converted into a dining room, and a menu inspired by some of the dishes that were once served at the places whose knick-knacks adorn the walls.

(You can see all my pictures in this Night at the Burger Museum flickr set).

The idea, and some of the original dish suggestions, came from Sef; the re-interpretation and execution were cooked up by Phil Bryant and Veronica Valdivia , who worked together at Norman’s 180, Yardbird and The Local before starting Heirloom Hospitality as a consulting business.

Here’s what was on the menu:

A root beer rum old fashioned, made with Havana Club Clasico rum, sassafras syrup and bitters, courtesy of the always ebullient Gio Gutierrez.

Inspired by the Burger King Yumbo Hot Ham and Cheese Sandwich: ham croquetas with a cheese center, served with "special sauce." I'll confess, I was alive for the original Yumbo (which Burger King originally offered from 1968 to 1974, then brought back for a limited time in 2014), but I have no memory of it. This recreation was a feat of engineering, a crispy globe encasing a core of minced ham and molten cheese magma.

Inspired by the Wendy's Chicken Cordon Bleu Sandwich and Sizzler's Cheese Toast: a chicken cordon bleu soup topped with crispy, spice-flecked chicken nuggets, with a faithfully recreated tranche of cheese-dusted Texas toast riding sidecar. Here's an ad with Dave Thomas hawking the original version, I'm guessing from the early 1990's.

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Cobaya Le Zoo Makoto with Chefs Julian Baker and Anthony Micari

I'm a big fan of collaborations. When you put two creative minds together, good things are bound to happen. Yet many "collaborative" dinner events turn out to not really involve all that much actual teamwork. Sure, the chefs will communicate about a menu and ingredients, and decide who is going to do what. But more often than not, they're ping-pong-ing courses back and forth, rather than working together to create dishes that are a genuine combined effort.

Which is one of the things that made our Cobaya dinner last week with chefs Julian Baker of Le Zoo, and Anthony Micari of Makoto, so special: each dish seemed to bear the imprint of both chefs, and both kitchens.

They had some advantages in doing so. The French bistro and contemporary Japanese restaurant are neighbors, both housed in the posh Bal Harbour Shops. They are also siblings of a sort, both under the management of Stephen Starr's Starr Restaurant Group.^[1] And they're both Cobaya alumni, in a way: Chef Baker hosted Cobaya Experiment #40 while he was chef at Toscana Divino in Brickell, and Makoto's namesake, head chef Makoto Okuwa, was the host for Cobaya Experiment #32.

For Experiment #75, the two chefs set up a table for thirty of us right between their two restaurants: smack in the middle of the breezeway of Bal Harbour Shops over a glassed-in koi pond that runs through the center. Amidst the shoppers browsing the Dolce & Gabbana couture and Fendi purses, they served a menu that combined, in each dish, the flavors and ingredients and techniques of France and Japan. Here's a recap:

(You can see all my pictures in this Cobaya Le Zoo Makoto flickr set)

Guinea Pigs starting to make their way in for Cobaya Experiment #75.

A snack as guests arrived, and a preview of what's to come: toasted baguettes smeared with a rich, and very French, chicken liver mousse, topped with a zingy, spicy, and very Japanese, yuzu kosho marmalade.

"Toro Niçoise." Chef Micari marinated block cuts of fatty tuna sashimi in soy sauce, toro zuke, style. Chef Baker brought the flavors of the Mediterranean: pickled haricots verts, tomatoes, niçoise olives, slivered radishes, a delicate squash blossom. Someone threw in some fudgy, Szechuan-spiced egg yolk, which was a very good idea. This was a great start.

"Japanese Bouillabaisse." Chef Micari brought some seafood from Tsukiji Market in Tokyo: gorgeous head-on shrimp, silky scallops, delicate baby calamari. It arrived at the table in a bowl with a rice puff rubbed with saffron aioli, the traditional accompaniment to a Provençal bouillabaisse. The dish was then finished with a tableside pour of a rich, heady, spicy seafood stew that had been enriched with red aka miso.

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