Hey, burger freaks: Were you planning to wait two hours-plus cooling your heels for Au Cheval’s crazypants patty? Hold your horses.
The fabled Chicago eatery — which bills itself as a diner and is French for “by horse” — just hitched up to 33 Cortlandt Alley after a year of hype. The Windy City has swooned over chef/owner Brendan Sodikoff’s Au Cheval for seven years. His burger’s been called America’s best.
Maybe it was once. The NYC location does serve tasty burgers — but this town’s full of tasty burgers that don’t cost you half a day. And tastier burgers that don’t cost $17-and-up, before $8 fries.
Make no mistake: Au Cheval is worth a visit, ideally at lunch when there’s little or no wait. It brings welcome life to the moody alley, with its Industrial-era-cool Edison bulbs, leather banquettes and century-old pillars that scream “Tribeca.”
The floor crew find your every request “perfect,” your meal choices “a good plan.” Greeters cheerfully take your name, estimate the wait time and call your cellphone when your table’s almost ready. Fun fact: I observed no sidewalk lines, even at night, despite breathless sightings online.
The menu has fat-and-salt-rich gut-busters such as honey-fried chicken, which had one couple repeatedly demanding replacement cloth napkins, and a fried baloney sandwich that looks like a nuclear mushroom cloud. “I don’t know where to start,” said the guy next to me, who gobbled up the whole meshugana mess in 10 minutes.
But 90 percent of customers order burgers, according to a waitress. I loved one similar to Au Cheval’s at Sodikoff’s 4 Charles Prime Rib two years ago, so I had high expectations.
“It’s absolutely worth it — the burgers are fantastic, fantastic,” a fellow diner reassured me on Monday night, when I was told a table for four would be free in 90 minutes. The guy, who was there with his girlfriend, said they’d waited for three hours the night before, although he couldn’t articulate what made the sandwiches so special.
But — big reveal! — this world-famous, tell-all-your-friends burger’s more routine than revolutionary. It was doubly disappointing at lunch, when I waited zero minutes to be seated but 30 minutes for the food. The open kitchen was backed up with empty buns awaiting their call to action.
The “single cheeseburger” ($17) actually includes two griddled, Angus beef patties on a brioche bun with American cheese, pickles and a thick dijonnaise smear. (A $19 “double cheeseburger” has three patties.)
The cheese was flavorless, the pickles too thin to add crunch. The dijonnaise “kind of brings it all together,” the waitress claimed. But it was all “aise” — the sweet, cloying, mostly-mayo goo made it impossible to taste the beef without taking the whole enchilada apart.
Once liberated, three different burgers I tried on two visits were pleasantly chewy but only middling-flavored by today’s earthy, artisanal-ground standards. Cooked medium by default, they were too dry to ooze even a drop of juice. (They’ll take it to medium-well, but you proceed at your peril.) A little crackle would help but they had no char to speak of.
The basic “single” is easy to eat with your hands but not when you have it with bacon ($4 more and worth it for thick, peppery slabs) and fried egg ($2) — the elements slide around the buns like eels.
Best in America? For my money, it isn’t even the best in Tribeca. I prefer the ones at Odeon, American Cut — and even those at no-frills Square Diner, where you get an oozy, mostly ground-chuck half-pounder for $9 with no wait at all.
A French couple strolling past, taken by the name on the sign, asked me what kind of place it was. They moved on when I told them it was mostly hamburgers. But I should have told them about Square Diner.
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