(Would you vote for this man?)
25 Degrees, 8.31.09
25 Degrees and myself have a sordid history.
Well, to be clear, every time I go into that place, it’s goddamned drama. The service is uniformly terrible, and there’s at least a 74% chance they will get my order wrong.
One time, aw man, one time they fucked up a grilled cheese sandwich.
Grilled cheese, dawg. It came out carmelized. Can you carmelize cheese? I dunno, but it was brown and hard and burnt beyond all recognition.
But this is about their burger, which is not as horrible as everything else.
Like The Counter, 25 Degrees has a do-it-yourself menu, allowing you to mix & match ingredients.
I’m on the fence about this whole idea. Sometimes, yeah, it’s fun. But I think at this point I want the chef to tell me what’s best. I’m some schmuck with a blog, he’s the one trained to make excellent food.
Presumably.
I keep it simple when faced with such menus. That mitigated the pain only slightly.
The meat was juicy, as I’d ordered it medium rare, but remarkably, lacked flavor. The sharp cheddar wasn’t sharp. The bun was decent, but the bacon I’d ordered was burnt.
I did like the sweet potato fries and the vanilla malt, and this particular time the wait staff was merely disinterested, vs. drenched in hipster ennui.
Nick & I spent the meal discussing what’s wrong w/America (he’s British, see) and concluded: everything.
At which point Nick thought it would be a good idea if he became president.
Which, really, not such a bad idea. Or maybe I was just drunk on vanilla malt.
GRADE: C
