Last night, I found myself at Cafe Asean in the West Village very openly staring at a woman eating a burger.
It wasn’t just any burger — it was the Cheryl Burger, my very first culinary creation to appear on an actual restaurant menu. Who wouldn’t be all excited and weird and googly-eyed at the sight of someone you don’t know actually eating a dish you dreamed up? Palms sweaty, I approached the woman to explain that a) I wasn’t some creep trying to intrude on her dinner–well, I wasn’t a creep without a somewhat valid reason, anyway… b) I’d designed the burger and c) I wanted to know, “What do you think?”
Mouth full, Susan the diner (who just so happens to have a fashion connection — she’s the designer of Skin Lingerie) gave me two thumbs up. And all of a sudden, the months of experimenting with meatball and burger recipes, marinating and pan-frying and then marinating more and grilling — it all suddenly seemed worth it. I felt like the Sally Field of cooking. I was liked! Well … my burger was liked, anyway.
The quest for the Cheryl Burger began at my last Labor Day cookout — after a heady evening of countless sauvignon blancs and burgers that had been steeped for hours in a marinade of hoisin sauce and Asian sesame oil before being thrown on the grill, a sated chef Simpson, owner of Cafe Asean, pronounced, “I’ll tell you what — if you come up with an Asian-style burger that I like, I’ll put it on the menu.”
And the challenge was ON!
The big question of the next few months was: What Asian flavors would work well in a western burger?
Teriyaki sauce? Too pedestrian. Hello, if even Mcdonald’s has done it, it’s done, done and done. I like hoisin — the sweet soybean-based sauce greatly enhances the flavor of beef. But Simpson himself had already done a hoisin burger at Jefferson,
another West Village restaurant he’d owned a few years ago. (Another fashion connection: Jefferson figured prominently in a key “Sex and the City” moment — it’s where Miranda held her wedding reception, when Samantha blurts
out to the girls that she has breast cancer.)