Blue Smoke, NYC: The Burger (and a little crow).

Allow me to eat a little crow. After all, I eat just about everything else. In another post I said that the Blue Smoke burger paled in comparison to another restaurant’s burger. I gave the wrong impression with that statement. I really liked the burger at Blue Smoke. I think you’d be hard pressed to find many better burgers in all of Manhattan. I also really liked the chicken wings and the craft brewed smoked lager they had on draft. I even really liked sitting at the bar. And I’ve got the pictures to prove it.

A photo of the excellent chicken wings. Not "Buffalo" style hot wings, just nicely sauced and a little smokey:



Here's the burger just brought to the table. We almost dug in before taking the picture. That arm in the background is about as good a picture of Tommy from Tommy:Eats as you're likely to get.



Here's the burger cut open in its medium rare glory. Pales by comparison to what you might rightly ask.



One curious thing was the way red wine was served at the bar. You've got to believe that they know better. Maybe there was a dishwasher strike. Maybe I'm just too picky.




Oh, they’ve got some great barbeque too, maybe you’ve heard? And jazz downstairs on the weekends. I’ve never been so I can’t tell you about that.

Blue Smoke, 116 E. 27th St. New York City (212)447-7733.

The Restaurant Curse

Ever bring a friend to a restaurant you’ve raved about only to have a terrible experience? Of course you have, we all have. A friend of mine calls this the “restaurant curse”. He usually blames me, as though the mere act of my walking through the restaurant’s door caused the karma in the place to shift and the chef to suddenly lose his chops. I’ve stopped sending people I know to restaurants I like because I can’t bear to hear stories like this.

If you’ve ever read this blog before then you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about the burger at Copeland. Hell, I’m tired of hearing me talk about the burger at Copeland. I thought that the burger was “restaurant curse” proof, I figured that if it could pass the Tommy:Eats test then it was safe, above bad mojo and all that. That was before last Friday night.

I had friends coming up from Philadelphia. Friends to whom I’d raved about that burger. We agreed to meet at the bar at Copeland at 7:15 last Friday. The place was packed. I saw burgers coming out of the kitchen. I drank weiss beers and waited for my friends to arrive. Then disaster: the kitchen ran out of burgers. Ran out of burgers! How does a restaurant run out of hamburgers? It was the “restaurant curse” in all its glory.

Where do you go to eat on a Friday night in Morristown at 8 PM when Copeland has no burgers? You certainly don’t want to stay at Copeland and eat their other overpriced and underwhelming offerings. We set out for Origin, 6-14 South St. (973)971-9933, a Thai-French fusion place near the Green but got there to find a half hour wait. I’ve eaten at Origin before and while the food is good its not half hour wait good.

Desperate, on foot and hungry we settled at Provesi at 50 South St, a casual Italian BYO. Sorry to say that I can’t recommend Provesi. A cold antipasto appetizer wasn’t bad but my margherita pizza was mediocre as were my friends’ chicken dishes. Great service could have made a big difference. The terrible service that we received buried this place for me: long waits for drinks and bread brought out long after it was asked for are just two examples. Next time we’ll look elsewhere.

The Copeland Burger/A Love Supreme

There’s a lot of talk about burgers out in the blogosphere. There are sites like A Hamburger Today dedicated to nothing but hamburgers. There was a documentary done about burgers. I’ve done my share of writing about burgers right here on the Blackeyedpig. Earlier this week I had lunch with Tommy of Tommy:Eats at Blue Smoke in New York City specifically to eat their hamburger. I took a train into Manhattan and killed the better part of a day just to eat a burger. It was a pretty good burger too and they’ve got some tasty beer on tap at Blue Smoke but, and this is important, their burger pales in comparison with the burger served at Copeland in Morristown.

Now this isn’t exactly breaking news. After all, I’ve blogged about how great the Copeland burger is previously, as has Tommy:Eats. However, I went back to Copeland the day after I ate at Blue Smoke and I was just blown away by how great the burger is. So why isn’t there a line snaking around the Governor Morris hotel the way the line does in Madison Square Park for the Shake Shack ? Here’s a theory: Copeland is too nice a restaurant to have street cred among burger aficionados. When people think of a place to have a great burger they think of a greasy spoon. A place like White Manna or White Mana, choose your location and spelling but both of these legendary NJ burger restaurants are both essentially dives, a place like Shake Shack, a place like the White Rose or White Diamond that we have in various locations around northern NJ. All of these places serve up a tasty burger, I’ll give you no argument, and all of them fit into our stereotype of a place to get a good burger. The diner in the famous Edward Hopper painting “Nighthawks” looks like the kind of place where you’d get a good burger.




Copeland doesn’t look like a place you’d get a good burger, it looks like the hotel restaurant that it is. A place where you need an expense account, a place where they expect you to have an expense account, a place where they don’t think twice about charging over $30 for most entrees. There are times when you need to put aside your preconceived notions and this is one of them. Put aside those preconceived notions and dig into the best hamburger you’re likely to ever order in a restaurant, maybe the best burger you’ll ever have anywhere. The secret is in the beef, the kobe beef. It’s not hard to make a good burger but it does take exceptional meat to make an exceptional one and a chef smart enough not to try and overwhelm that ingredient with lots of fancy toppings. The Copeland burger comes with cheese, bacon, tomato and lettuce, it doesn’t need to come with more. It doesn’t need to be offered in a hundred variations. It doesn’t need to come with anything at all except the home made brioche bun which holds it together and absorbs the burger’s juices.

So put aside your greasy spoon bias and give Copeland a try. If I can go to New York to eat a burger I don’t see why people can’t travel to Morristown to do the same. If you need company, I’m usually around.

Here's another look at a picture of the Copeland burger from a previous entry: