The $50 Hamburger

Yes. Civilization is now at an end. Why do you ask?

If there weren’t two crisp twenties under the bun, I couldn’t imagine what would make this worth it. But if you live long enough in a city where a first-grader’s birthday party can cost $3,000, you must remain sanguine in the face of absurdity.

I had started on a Saturday night with a $41 burger. By Sunday night, two miles on the treadmill later, I was at another restaurant uptown, face to face with a $50, 4-inch-tall tower of beef and bun, 2 inches higher than my black French pumps. This was not the launch of my Atkins diet. Rather, I had resigned myself to covering a competition between restaurateurs over who could reinvent the great American hamburger and charge the most for it.

Even though the bubble has burst and the country is facing an international crisis, New York City is fully engaged in a war over turning a low-rent food into something ineluctable.

This all heated up shortly after New Year’s.

For the first time, one of the oldest steakhouses in New York added a hamburger to its menu. Located in the meatpacking district since 1868, the Old Homestead offered 20 ounces of beer-fed Kobe beef on a bun for $41.

A few days later at DB Bistro Moderne, a top-rated French chef with a yen for publicity raised the stakes. Daniel Boulud began shaving $350-per-pound black truffles onto his regular DB Burger, raising the price from $29 to $50. This offering was good only for the four short months of the truffle season.

There’s a wonderful bit later on in the article about how

“Everyone has $41,” Sherry said. “Or everyone can raise $41.” After all, he bragged, he sold 200 burgers the first day, 140 of them takeout orders from the nearby financial district. So much for the bear market.

Man. Now that’s disposable income.