On my last day in NYC, I went into restaurant in Bloomingdales called "David Burke," which (at the time) seemed to be a really bad name for a restaurant. Kind of unappetizing! Turns out it's the name of a superchef, this guy (David Burke) who seems to have had the same basic idea that my friend Annie and I had. I kind of don't want to talk about the hot dog now, because I'm a little sad that now Annie and I won't be able to get filthy stinking rich off of our idea.
Anyway, the reason I ate there was because you could see the menu from the street, and on the menu was this:
Kobe beef bad-ass dog
With mustard oil, angry onion jam, all-natural, antibiotic and hormone-free
Or something like that. Okay, I was like. So I went in and ordered it and ate it. Somewhere in there I photographed it (see above). I'm not going to review it properly, because I think food reviewing requires special writing skills I don't really have. Here are some things I was thinking, though; during this process.
- Making a hot dog out of Kobe beef sets an awfully high expectation.
- All this stuff surrounding the hot dog itself made me slightly suspicious. The flame-toasted bun of "real" bread, the deep-fried onion slivers, the "angry onion jam" (a kind of relish, I think), the sheer size of the dog itself (about the size of a baby's arm), and even the sheer lack of antibiotics all seemed just a little like misdirection.
- Even the most pampered, massaged-by-giant-naked-women, beer-fed Wagyu cow has lips, and it has an asshole.
I'm not saying it wasn't good. Hot dogs are good. That's just it, though. All hot dogs are pretty good. I think 99% of the hot dogs available for sale today hover between 5 and 5.5 on an imaginary deliciousness scale of one to ten. At least to my palette, they are incapable of being any better or any worse. I think the only way you can move them up or down on the scale is to be hungrier, or smear them with some horrifying non-food substance (respectively).
Don't get me wrong; I don't think this is a scam, or anything. I'm the first person to say that the Emperor looks fucking fabulous, and anyone who can't see that is a goddamned idiot. I do think that this particular Kobe hot dog may have been wasted on me. While I consider myself an eater and and enjoyer of all things food, I can't say that the Kobe anything really shone through. Still, I give the Kobe beef bad-ass dog from David Burke at Bloomingdales 5.4 stars--a fine rating, as hot dogs go.
