No. 26: Design for the 70%

★ ★ ★ ★ Marlowe makes food critic Michael Bauer’s favorite burger. We think it’s pretty good too.

At first glance the Marlowe Burger may not seem all that remarkable. Niman Ranch beef and an Acme bun are pretty much the cost of entry if you want to put a burger on a menu in San Francisco. Add bacon and cheese? Been there. Caramelized onions? Done that. A perfunctory dash of shredded lettuce adds some contrasting color, though does little to enhance the flavor or texture. But the broad strokes aren't what define the Marlowe Burger, the details are.

Starting with the patty, the beef is about 20% fat to 80% lean ground beef. Marlowe adds a little lamb to the mix, giving the meat a richer, gamier flavor. The difference, while subtle, is distinctive. A horseradish aioli stands in for mustard to great effect. The choice of cheddar for the cheese delivers an extra tanginess that pairs masterfully with the smokey Del Monte bacon. The burger is beautifully balanced, with a perfect bun to burger ratio. The thin, crisp bacon adds just the right amount of crunch before your teeth sink into the juicy, pink-in-the-middle patty, and the sharp cheese, salt and horseradish give the whole thing just the right amount of kick.

Marlowe made a splash with their burger early, unseating Zuni Café as Michael Bauer’s pick for ‘Best burger in the Bay Area.’ When I googled “Marlowe” my browser autofilled “Marlowe Burger.” When they opened in 2010 the burger was offered at $12, a few dollars more than the high end of average. By January of this year that price had crept up another $2 to $14. Today it will set you back $16—a 34% increase over the original price. I overheard someone at our communal table grumbling about the idea that any burger could cost sixteen bucks (he ordered the steak for $21). I have similar misgivings. Marlowe’s is one of the pricier burgers we’ve tried. Had it not been for my professional obligation (and the generosity of my friend Dave, who picked up the check), I might have had second thoughts about paying $16 for a hamburger, no matter how good it is. But I did. And that, my friends, is this week’s lesson.

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The Creative Lesson

Lose to win. As we commiserated over the trials of business ownership, creative leadership, professional integrity, and other issues, Dave said a very interesting thing, “If you’re not losing 30% of your pitches because you’re too expensive, then you’re charging too little.” There’s an elegant truth to that insight. Everything is too expensive for someone—either because they don’t have the money or because they do but don’t see the value of spending it. Marlowe wins most customers on the basis of quality and loses a few on the basis of price. In the process they attract a clientele that values quality and doesn’t mind paying for it, weeding out the bargain hunters along the way. If this philosophy is good enough for pricing a hamburger, surely it’s good enough for pricing professional services as well.

No. 25: Come for the Banksy, Stay for the Burger

★ ★ ★ ★ That black building with the red curtains and door at the corner of Mission and Sycamore is The Sycamore. It’s that place you keep biking (or walking or driving) past because it looks like a crappy dive bar.

Graffiti mars the Mission Street facade, which Sycamore shares with a spiritual psychic and a splotchy-looking mural of something in bottle. It’s hard to tell what. The logo on the window is a poorly vectorized tracing of the first image that pops up when you google “sycamore tree drawing” (for real. I tried it on a hunch). On the other hand, there’s a fantastic Zio Ziegler mural on the Sycamore side—though it regrettably replaced a rare San Francisco Banksy. 

The commitment to the black-and-red color scheme continues inside, where half a dozen tables ring the dimly-lit space. The walls and ceiling are a deep red, as is the bar. The chairs and built-in benches are black, with black and white cushions. At noon on a Thursday they’re also empty. Two women stand behind the bar—one counting bills, the other eating a salad. T-Rex blasts from the speakers. It’s our first hint that there’s more to this dive bar than meets the eye. 

The next hint is the brunch menu: Belgian waffles stuffed with prosciutto and Manchego cheese, topped with fried chicken and drizzled with maple syrup and Makers Mark, Pork Belly filled doughnut holes, bottomless mimosas, etc. As we look over the menu trying to settle on our sliders (beef and blue cheese, lamb and onion, fried chicken and gravy on a fresh buttermilk biscuit...) a man comes in and asks about the day’s special. “I'm doing a burger today,” the bartender answers, “with cheese, bacon and barbecue sauce. It comes with fries and a PBR for twelve bucks.” Everyone orders one. Medium rare.

We make our way to the patio. The high walls are covered with a sprawling mural by Paul Hayes. A handful of other patrons are taking advantage of the Mission micro climate. Two dogs lounge in the shade. We sit at a steeply slanted picnic table as 20th Century Boy crashes to a close and the Kinks drift in, snaking through the pot-laced air. It’s hot and there are too few umbrellas.  

More people wander back. A man and his Pabst. A couple and their cabernet. Our burgers arrive as advertised—pinkish in the middle with all the aforementioned fixings. At most dive bars you can count on the bun letting down an otherwise decent burger. Not at Sycamore. Their bun is soft and airy, with a light crust elastic enough to keep the barbecue sauce from disintegrating the whole thing. The server tells me they come from Chestnut Bakery. It seems symbolic of the city that a Mission dive bar buys artisinal bread from the Marina. But just as there’s no pretense about the place, there’s also no pretense about the burger. Nor is there any vegetable—just a satisfying concoction of sweet, saucy, salty, fatty deliciousness. It’s emblematic of the unifying theory that unites doughnut holes, bacon, never-ending morning mimosas, glam rock and weed: feel-good ingredients only, please. 

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The Creative Lesson

The best laid plans. We selected Sycamore specifically for their sliders. That was our plan. We wanted something a little different than your textbook definition burger and we’d heard good things about the Sycamore. But chancing to overhear that there was a special (and it was a burger!) seemed too serendipitous to pass up. As designers we like to plan. Design, after all, is a plan. But as much as we strive to ensure the deliberateness of things, we must remember that it is spontaneity that leaves to discovery.

No. 12: Honest to Goodness

★ ★ ★ ★ At the corner of Haight and Masonic, just one block from San Francisco’s most famous intersection, you’ll find the magnificent Magnolia Gastropub Brewery. Inside you’ll find one of the best regularly available burgers the City has to offer.

At $17 the Pub Burger is on the pricier side, even for San Francisco. Add cheese, bacon and an egg and your tab runs north of $20. Fortunately, the lettuce, tomato and red onion come standard. Although we normally bless our burgers with slice of American or cheddar, we had ours as it comes (medium rare, of course) and didn’t miss the cheese. The hand-formed, Prather Ranch patty may be the freshest I’ve tasted. It has a coarse grind and plenty of fat. Ours were generously proportioned and cooked to a perfect 130˚. The Acme bun performed well against an onslaught of juices, with just the right balance of softness and firmness. I thought it was a little too much bread to go through to get to my burger, but Nathan felt it was well-balanced. Magnolia makes its own mustard and aioli, both of which I recommend. A word of caution: the beer mustard has a strong flavor and pungent aroma; administer it judiciously or risk overpowering your burger.

Clearly this is a first rate burger. We’ve called it one of the best. We’ve described it as “perfect.” It’s been recommended to us by more than a dozen readers, not to mention friends, colleagues, and anyone who knows we’re on the hunt for a great burger experience. So why only four stars? What could possibly be done to make it better? Magnolia makes a really, really good burger. It’s just not a great burger. It’s not a burger you’ll bike across town for on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not a burger you’re going to insist your out-of-town relatives have to try when they come visiting. Why not?

That’s the question we found ourselves pondering over today’s lunch: What’s the difference between good and great? Individually, every element of Magnolia’s burger was excellent. Together, though, they never achieved that alchemy that makes something exceed the sum of its parts. Why this is is a bit of a mystery, but if you’ve ever been in love you know what I mean. Either the spark is there or it isn’t. 

The atmosphere at Magnolia is a carefully crafted pastiche of British pub style. The dark wood, black-leather-upholstered booths draw you into the space and away from the funkiness of the neighborhood outside. The once regular pattern of floor tiles has long since deferred to seismic influences. Mirrored columns at the bar cast little reflection through their ancient patina. Great portions of ceiling paint peel and blister above us. Though authentic, one has the sense that these proudly historic elements have been preserved, curated and encouraged. And it’s a nagging sense. Similarly, the menus are designed to look reclaimed and reassembled. Though the typography on the cover of the menu is delightfully eclectic, inside I think it tries a bit too hard with its overuse of Regula—a transitional typeface whose pre-distressed ‘Old Face’ option feels more the domain of treasure maps than menus. 

Above the famously grateful bar one wall is painted with a faux gold finish, obscuring (I would later learn) a mural of Jerry Garcia. And maybe that’s the clue. Magnolia is peculiarly at odds with its location—a brooding hipster surrounded by aging hippies, skaters, weekend runaways, and the tourists who come to see them. It eschews its funky surroundings for a darker kind of romance—an effort that does not go unnoticed. Here again, it’s the noticing that matters. Every designed experience relies on a degree of veneer, but there is an element of artifice to Magnolia that doesn’t let you fully devote yourself to it. It’s the nuanced difference between good and great; between loving and being in love.

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The Creative Lesson

Keep it real. Designers talk a lot about authenticity. Usually it means we want to create honest messages in an honest way, and that we want our clients to run businesses that are true to their vision and values. A big part of this is about integrity. Another big part is about effort. When you make too much of an effort to ensure your customers see your business the same way you see it messages can feel forced. Your efforts disingenuous. For the record, I don’t think this was a huge issue at Magnolia. The food was excellent. Our server was friendly and well informed. But being finely attuned to the tiniest details of the burger-eating experience, this authenticity gap was—for us—distance between good and great.

No. 10: Through and Thru

★ ★ ★ ★ It’s difficult to be critical of In-N-Out. From the macro (their insistence on freshness and quality, for example) to the micro (the fact that they hang the punctuation on their fry trays) there’s much to laud about this fast-service fixture of the California roadway. In its category, In-N-Out makes the most consistently satisfying burger around. But rather than further polish their already lustrous image by adding one more ode to the countless others that praise its excellence, this review will focus on one distasteful byproduct of the chain’s most significant innovation. Hint: it has to do with Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare introduced nearly 1,700 words to the English language, including nine from the (admittedly labored) passage above: critical, fixture, roadway, lustrous, ode, countless, excellence, distasteful, and hint. In-N-Out, on the other hand, gave us the drive through. More horrifying, they gave us the word thru.

Harry and Esther Snyder opened the first In-N-Out in Baldwin Park, California in 1948, the same year McDonald’s shifted its focus from barbecue to hamburgers. Like McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr., In-N-Out was early to embrace the new fast-service restaurant model and burgeoning car culture. Unlike their competitors, the restaurant was founded with a vision for achieving maximum quality rather than maximum quantity. Committed to using “the freshest, highest quality foods you can buy,” providing friendly service, and offering both in a “sparkling clean environment,” In-N-Out built a small but loyal following over the next 30 years. Adhering to both its original mission and menu, they expanded to 28 locations by the time Harry Snyder died in 1976. McDonald’s, by contrast, opened its 4,000th store that same year. While McDonald’s’ Ray Kroc and others eschewed short-order cooking for sophisticated process management techniques—essentially reducing the ‘cooking’ process to an assembly line—Snyder insisted that his all-beef patties be cooked to order, fresh potatoes be cut for the fries, and the slow-rising sponge-dough buns be baked on site. The Snyders also refused to franchise, believing it would cause them to lose their grip on quality.

Besides their operational differences, In-N-Out also distinguishes itself on the experience side. For 66 years their menu has remained essentially unchanged. They offer a burger in three varieties (hamburger, cheeseburger and double cheeseburger), three flavors of shake, and fries. The rudimentary menu simplifies the ordering experience and reinforces the company’s ethos of doing a few things well. Their famous ‘secret menu’ allows the restaurant to customize orders to individual customer preferences while keeping the core offering streamlined and focused. Little touches also abound. There are fresh lemon wedges at the self-serve soda fountain, free hats and stickers for the kids, and a motif of peculiarly crossed palm trees which exist only to pay tribute the cult film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a favorite of the late Harry Snyder.

When the lines get too long at the drive through, In-N-Out sends employees out to take your order directly.

Oh, the drive through. That’s where this all started isn’t it? 

In-N-Out is widely credited with inventing the drive through restaurant. Drive-in restaurants were already popular at the time, but the Snyders were the first to take the concept a step further with introduction of the drive up order window. Though some dispute that claim, everyone agrees that they were the first to employ an intercom system for ordering, an innovation which sped up the process considerably (though their cook-to-order policy still resulted in long lines and traffic jams, causing some cities to delay or deny new building permits). Somewhere in their quest to balance quality and expediency, the decision was made to designate the new drive-up ordering lane as the ‘Drive Thru.’

Though the preposition thru has existed as an informal spelling of through since 1839, it has always been fairly obscure. After the Snyders used it in their signage, imitators followed suit. Today, t-h-r-u is the defacto spelling in the context of the drive thru and is slowly creeping into everyday usage as well. While I concede that language is constantly evolving, the infiltration of words like quik, thru, nite, etc. are particularly irksome. No only do they look bad, they are lazy, dumbed-down versions of actual words, employed simply for convenience. Whenever I go through an In-N-Out (don’t get me started on that ‘N’) I cringe. When I see a Krispy Kreme I kringe. When it comes to Toys "Я" Us I don’t know what to do. Notwithstanding the double prime marks in place of quotation marks (which are themselves grammatically incorrect), the backwards ‘R’ for ‘are’ is insultingly stupid. On top of it all it should read Toys Are We. Got Milk? Because internet. 

In nearly every other aspect of its operations, presentation and culture, In-N-Out is uncompromising. Their use of language, however, is doubleplusungood. I don’t expect a burger chain to hold high the banner for grammatical correctness, but for one to whom every detail seems to matter, such lexical laziness is especially disappointing.

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The Creative Lesson

Choose your words wisely. In-N-Out is not a highbrow institution. They sell $2 cheeseburgers and give you a box so you can eat them in the car. But if the ingredients matter, and the service matters, and speed and cleanliness and price matters, then surely words matter too. Language is the fabric of culture. It binds us to one another through the interweaving of meaning and history, invention and creativity. From La-Z-Boy to Kum-N-Go to donuts to Nannygate, from grammatically egregious tag lines to pseudo-phonetic, quasi-homonymic brand names, to “misplaced” quotes to the flat out stupid, lazy or illogical, uncrafted language is, at best, intellectually insulting. At worst it is antisocial. Choose (or create) your words wisely, they both matter and endure.

I suppose this is less of a lesson and more of a rant. The verb ‘rant,’ by the way, was coined by Shakespeare.

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No. 8: Dare Mighty Things

★ ★ ★ ★ If the Breakfast Burger at Roosevelt’s Tamale Parlor was a designer, it would be Alex Trochut.

If you’re not familiar with Alex’s work, allow me to correct that oversight. Alex Trochut is 33-year old Spanish-born illustrator and designer. His work is highly expressive, complex and fluid, but with a deliberateness that imbues it with arresting focus. While other maximalist designers achieve complexity through layers of embellishment and intricate decoration, Trochut’s work seems to explode outward from a singular idea—twisting and bending into new expressive forms. In this way he manages to amplify the idea rather than obfuscate it with excessive ornamentation.

The objects and letterforms with which he works are familiar, but have been warped, extruded and otherwise refashioned into bold re-imaginings of themselves—often to the point that they challenge our taste or understanding. The intensity of Truchot’s work comes not only from the fearlessness of its form, but from its unwavering commitment to an underlying concept. 

Like Trochut’s work, Roosevelt’s Breakfast Burger may be an acquired taste for some. The initial presentation is stunning and provocative. Piled high with a thick slice of tomato, melted American cheese, grilled onions, shredded lettuce, cabbage and carrots and a deliciously gooey fried egg, it resembles a burger but clearly has much more going on. The soft grilled bun appears dwarfed by its contents, which spill out even before the first bite (be forewarned: the first bite often results in an explosion of hot yolk). The patty is unusually dense. At first I was put off by its texture, but soon came to accept and even enjoy it as contrast to its mushy compatriots. Every bite is incredibly—almost impossibly—hot, making the whole experience one that cannot be entertained passively. 

The first time I ate at Roosevelt’s I paired my burger with a pinot noir recommended to me by a woman at a nearby table. It was an excellent glass, but the wrong choice for such an exuberant sandwich. On a subsequent visit I opted for a Trochut-worthy “Bloody Tecate”. The effervescent flavor of a spicy, beer-based bloody mary was the ideal complement—fiery, expressive and a little disorienting.

All things considered, Roosevelt’s makes a first-rate burger—different enough to stand apart from the crowd but not so removed from its context as to be unrecognizable.

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The Creative Lesson

Embrace a point of view. Neither Alex Trochut nor Roosevelt’s Breakfast Burger appeal to everyone. That’s not a weakness, it’s a strength. Trochut’s work can be wild and weird and challenging but it’s always clear. Clarity doesn’t come from minimalism or modernism or focus groups or catering to the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t come from trying to anticipate what your audience wants. Clarity comes from understanding what you want to say and how you want to say it (and why). Greatness, in other words, finds its own audience.

Illustrations and objects by the inimitable Alex Trochut. Please check out his work .

No. 1: The Power of Pickles

★ ★ ★ ★ Disclosure: the folks who own Super Duper are clients of MINE™.

Super Duper makes a super burger. I’d say it’s in the real fast food category, meaning that it’s fast food that is also real food. In-n-Out and Smashburger would be the same category. We have a few qualms about the menu design (occupational hazard) and there are some inconsistencies to the branding that we’d like to one day address, but when it comes to their eponymous offering it’s hard to find a flaw. Super’s Mini Burger features a 4oz. patty garnished with lettuce, tomato, American cheese and of course their “super sauce”. The patty is thin and their grill is hot, so the meat comes out perfectly seared on the outside and deliciously juicy inside. The buns is basic and toasted. Everything is in perfect proportion. You have the option to add jalapeño, fried egg, onions and other toppings, but as-is it’s about as close to the iconic all-American burger as you can get.

When we turn this blog into a book, we plan to include a full case-study on Super Duper—the strategy naming, branding, decor, menu, experience design, even how they handle their trash. For now, let’s just focus on the pickles. The pickles at Super are pretty amazing. They make them themselves and large jars of them are stocked in the front of their stores. They’re also free. It may seem like a small detail, but it’s a significant one in two important ways:

1. Generosity. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but starting off your lunch with a little something on the house creates an atmosphere of generosity, hospitality and general good will. In a world that nickels and dimes you for every little “extra” unlimited free pickles set Super apart as relaxed, friendly and customer-focused.
   
   
2. Quality. Perhaps the most important function of the pickle is that it sets up an expectation of quality. It is almost guaranteed that the first thing you’ll eat at Super Duper is one (or more) of their free pickles. You’re waiting. They’re there. It’s inevitable. The genius of this is that their pickles are delicious— crisp and tangy with just enough crunch to make each bite a satisfying one. They’re artisanal, not industrial, and this impression is then transferred to the burger.

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The Creative Lesson

Manage first impressions. Super Duper’s pickles are an inexpensive and powerful brand message. Believe it or not, they're a sophisticated expression of a thoughtful brand strategy.

By stocking them front of house (the way Five Guys stocks its peanuts on the dining area floor) one has the sensation of stepping into a working kitchen rather than some antiseptic fast food cafeteria. By giving their handmade pickles away for free they establish a rapport of pride and generosity with their customers. And by keeping the quality high and consistent they *demonstrate* these values rather than stating them with empty tag lines or insistent signs declaring “hand-crafted” and “artisan”.