No. 28: Think Different

★ ★ Barney’s Gourmet Hamburger was an early entrant into the Bay Area’s ‘better burger’ scene, but it hasn’t kept up with the times.

Although Barney’s is a perennial favorite in reader’s choice polls and ‘Best of’ lists in local publications like The Guardian, East Bay Express, The Chronicle, and others, we found the experience and the burger underwhelming. Their website boasts of a thirty-five year heritage and a “unique, award-winning concept for creating quality hamburgers.” That concept, it turns out, is to offer fresh ingredients and impeccable facilities.

With a few notable exceptions, most things that were awesome in 1979 don’t inspire the same feelings of awe today. Times change. People change. Tastes change. Barney’s has a bigger-is-better attitude when it comes to its burgers: the patty is thick. The tomato is thick. The onion is thick. Add an ample bun, and there’s a lot to work through to arrive at the heart of the matter. It draws sharp contrast with most of the ‘better burgers’ we’ve tried lately, which work hard to master the proportions of the ingredients. They balance flavor and texture and volume to create a carefully orchestrated experience. Barney’s, on the other hand, still takes a features-based approach: Lettuce? Check. Onion? Check. Tomato? Check. Yes, all that produce is fresh, but it’s 2014 in San Francisco. Everyone’s produce is fresh. Every burger has Intel Inside. It’s no longer a differentiator.

Like a mid-90’s Apple catalog, the menu is vast and varied, with six classic burgers and twenty-four specialty burgers (each with five different patty options). Somewhere between the wild Alaskan salmon patty with teriyaki glaze, grilled pineapple and Canadian bacon, and the whole wheat pita wrapped Garden Burger® with avocado, feta cheese, lettuce, tomato and cucumbers, Barney’s has surrendered its own point of view of what a burger should be. Who cares if you offer a Quadra 950, a Performa 6260CD, 6290, and 6290CD? In the end, they’re all beige boxes. 

Barney’s may have set the standard for fast causal burgers 30 years ago, but yesterday’s benchmark is today’s baseline. Now that everyone makes a burger Barney’s needs to streamline their offerings and focus on how their burgers are different and how their experience is special.

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The Creative Lesson

Narrow your focus. The problem with great ideas is that people love them. The problem with that is that people copy them. Barney’s had a unique proposition back in 1979. It had a vision that a burger chain wasn’t obligated to serve over-salted food on plastic trays under fluorescent lights. Fast, fresh food in a clean environment was not a ubiquitous idea back then.

As others caught up in quality, Barney’s reenergized its appeal by diversifying its menu—giving diners a dizzying array of choices. But customers already have a choice between you and your competitors; competing simply by offering choice yourself is a marginal proposition. Barney’s is looking narrowly when it ought to look broadly, and broadly when it ought to be focused. To keep current you need to regularly survey the landscape. To stay relevant, you need set your sights on a specific destination within the landscape—or better yet, look to the horizon.

No. 22: Drawing the Line

★ ★ Whiz Burger sits at the corner of 18th Street and South Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco’s Mission District. Miraculously, they’ve been flipping burgers there for nearly 60 years.

I’ve driven by 50’s era burger stand hundreds of times over the years. Each time I make a mental note to give it a try—seduced, perhaps, by its disintegrating all-American charm and sheer longevity, but ultimately dissuaded by the swirling trash and laminated color printouts advertising chicken teriyaki. 

Unsurprisingly, we opted for a burger. Whiz offers them up in ten varieties: from cheese to chili, bacon to turkey. We opted for the ‘Whiz’ in part because of its eponymy but also because they drew a box around it on the menu.

The Whiz Burger is 1/3 pound of ground chuck served with bacon, avocado, chopped iceberg lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, mustard, and mayo on a french(ish) roll. I say ‘ish’ because it is shaped like a french roll, but really it’s just oblong bread. The obvious geometric challenge of how to fit a round patty into an oval bun is resolved by folding the meat over on itself. I wish they took advantage of this peculiarity in some way (melting the cheese between the layers of meat, for example) but alas it is simply a matter of pragmatics.

The burger, while decently cooked, was disappointing overall. The ingredients were fresh but not thoughtfully apportioned. Like the sloppily-folded patty, the toppings seemed haphazardly arranged. The avocado (which ought to have been bacon-adjacent) kept squirting out from under the patty. The chopped lettuce did what chopped lettuce does, which is fall all over the place. Somehow everything—including the overly-generous bun—coalesced into a single, soft, unsatisfying texture. 

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The Creative Lesson

Look here! Discussion about design tend to deal with strategy or branding or storytelling or problem-solving, etc. We talk about systems and sustainability and semiotics. We spin stories around new technology and write odes to traditional craft. Sometimes, though, design is graphic. A simple box highlighting a single burger separated it from the fray; just four right angles that said, “We care more about this burger.” So we did too.

No. 13: House of the Rising Bun

★ ★ Nathan is on vacation in Japan, but of course we put him to work. He emailed me this review of a Japanese take on the American classic:

Hey Christopher,

I just left Kyoto. I had a burger while I was there. In retrospect, Kyoto was probably a strange place to seek out a burger; famous as it is for being the stronghold of everything traditionally Japanese. Then again, perhaps that’s a fine enough reason so long as you don’t hope for anything too familiar.

I have given up on hamburgers as an antidote for homesickness. In rural China, near the Tibetan border, I once ordered a hamburger but was served instead a steak of gristly yak meat between two thick slices of toast. What a disappointment. There is simply too much nostalgia built into a hamburger. How wonderful would it have been to have ordered a yak steak sandwich and received a yak steak sandwich? When abroad I think it is best to keep one’s hamburger expectations low.

So we rented bicycles and rode out to a small cafe called Salut Ya. It is located in a renovated old machiya (townhouse) and I heard is famous for it’s burger.

I ordered their cheeseburger. What arrived on my plate appeared to very nearly be a classic cheeseburger. All the usual elements were stacked in place: bun, lettuce, tomato, grilled onion, melted slice of cheese, beef patty, bun. But the burger arrived cut in half like a deli sandwich. A pair of toothpicks kept each slice intact. The grind was dense and devoid of grease, juiciness, or attitude. The bread dominated. It was a round (very round) sesame-encrusted baguette— puffed up like a rotund caricature of a bun.

There was, however, one inspired moment in Salut Ya’s burger.  It occurred at the crossroads of its most misguided elements: the patty that was too dense and the bun that was too bready. The diameter of the patty was just narrower than the diameter of the bun. This offset allowed it to be pressed slightly into the soft spongy part of the bread, such that it was encased by the lip of the crusty part. Sadly, this clever feat was made possible by the two elements that were least satisfying.

To be honest, the meal was not unpleasant, so long as the memory of a cheeseburger didn’t crop up. Because what looked like a classic cheeseburger was more of a beefy hamburger-inspired sandwich. Looked at this way, it was a hell of a lot better than yak.

Cheers,

Nathan

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The Creative Lesson

Get the big things right before you get the small things right. There’s no point in kerning a headline before you've settled on what the message is or refining a sketch before you’ve heard the brief. Starting with the small things can lead to the false assurance that a problem has been solved, when in fact that problem was a false problem. As in the case of this burger, the delightful detail of the meat seated into the bun did nothing to resolve the bigger issue of taste.

No. 2: Play Musty for Me

★ ★ In a small service alley off of Mission Street in San Francisco, a rotating collection of food trucks gather at midday. Today, three of them are parked in tandem down the dead-end street. Ebbett’s Good To Go is serving cuban sandwiches near the dumpsters at the back of the alley. Up front, the exuberantly decorated Chairman Bao is making a brisk business of selling steamed buns at $4.50 a pop. Between them sits the elusive Doc’s of the Bay, an all-American comfort food station on wheels praised for its fried chicken, house made ketchup, and of course its hamburger.

Two alleys over the pavement reeks of urine and ammonia and the air is hazy with cheap weed and thick with the self-loathing scent of the smoke-break-cigarette. Here the aroma of frying onions, ground beef, and cheese mingles with exhaust from the trio of generators that reverberate in the narrow void of this unplanned space. The smoke from Doc’s grill hangs low in the air, a colloid of carbon and grease too heavy to escape the high walls of this urban canyon and too savorous to cause us to retreat instead. Quite literally, it is suspenseful.

The smokey, steamy, fume-filled air is anticipatory—each scent a promise of a flavor to come. When our names are called over the cycling generators and sizzling fat we seize  our burgers eagerly. The first bite of Doc’s Classic Burger is unforgettable. Through the toasted bun, warm melted cheese and cold ripe tomato arises a distinctive mushroomy flavor. That is, the flavor is distinctly fungal. It tastes at first like the rich, earthy flavor of a woodland mushroom, an artifact—I presume—of a well-seasoned grill. I’m not certain that I like the flavor, but I’m attracted to the idea that this patty contains the secret history of its predecessors in its crispy edges. Nathan is similarly confronted and asks, “Does this taste…musty to you?” 

As soon as he says this, I realize that it is indeed an unsettling mustiness swirling through my nose and clinging unpleasantly to my tongue. It’s not the flavor of woodland mushrooms, nor truffles, nor anything that belongs in a kitchen. It is exactly the flavor of your favorite childhood book, pulled from a box in the basement to reveal a cover blooming with moldy spores. Each bite offers no relief, just as each turn of the page confirms that your childhood storybook is beyond redemption. 

I may have been convinced that it was a flavor too subtle or refined or new for my palate to identify. I could have been told (and I may have believed) that it was an acquired taste that I would come to appreciate. Once labeled “musty” however, those options were closed to me. The label—not I—was in control of the experience. 

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The Creative Lesson

Name the frame. When presenting creative options give each a name—this one is contemporary, this one is traditional, etc. If you don’t someone else will and you’ll be at the mercy of their label, not yours.

Once, when presenting logo directions to Stanford University, I showed three options which, in the interest of neutrality, I labelled A, B and C. Someone in the meeting made a remark about direction C looking like a butt, from which point on it was referred to as the “butt logo” (and from which point on I knew it had no chance of being picked). Ever after I've given my own nicknames to every idea we present.