If you noticed the air in Chinatown yesterday was filled with the wafting scents of grilled meats, melted cheese, and loud burping, it’s because inside the courtyard of the Hotel Monaco, a few hundred gourmands dared to gulp down 10 different—and often extravagant—one-off burgers concocted for a gut-busting charity event.
The Burger Battle pitted chefs from around the D.C. area in a competition to determine who could create the most inventive meat patty sandwich. Proceeds for the $75 event were donated to Brainfood, a local nonprofit organization that promotes youth development through nutrition, food service, and urban agriculture.
The burgers—which, thankfully, were slider-sized—ranged from the creatively demure to the outright insane. Anthony Chittum of Alexandria’s Vermillion pocketed a lamb patty in a pita with feta, tomato, and cucumber, for perhaps the day’s tamest sandwich.
Contrast that with the one cruelly devised by The Source’s Scott Drewno. “The Beast,” as Drewno’s team named it, took two beef patties—square, to match their Wendy’s-esque T-shirts—and topped them with the following:
- two slices of cheese
- onions caramelized in duck fat
- coffee-and-bacon chili
- Duke’s mayonnaise
- Heinz ketchup
The lunatic contraptions were placed on freshly baked potato buns, with Ruffles sour cream and onion chips baked into the lids. Oh, and then the burgers were impaled on a skewer topped off by an Old Bay-seasoned tater tot. This reporter managed about three bites, but could not eat another thing all afternoon.
Drewno’s maniac burger was the favorite of both his fellow chefs and the four judges who managed to sample all 10 entries. The audience prize went to the host restaurant, Poste Moderne Bistro. Chef Dennis Marron prepared something called the “110 Percent Burger,” which he described as being with a patty composed of 25 percent each chuck, short rib, ribeye, and brisket, finished off with another “10 percent” beef cheek.
“We’re not good at math,” Marron said. By day’s end, anyone who tried all 10 burgers probably wasn’t good at anything but clutching their sides.
