The Ear Inn

We met family friends for dinner last night at a historic dive in SoHo called The Ear Inn (pictured above¹). Last week, I had seen a Guardian article on the "50 best things to eat in the world"; number three on that list was the burger at a New York City restaurant called Little Owl. George, an old friend of my parents, enjoys a good burger, so I invited him to join us. It turned out that Little Owl doesn't offer burgers for dinner, so George suggested the Ear Inn. An old man, he enjoys visiting old places. His son Jimmy joined us.

The family loves meat: Jimmy mentioned he was taking a charcuterie class at the French Culinary Institute in town. He wants to learn how to age his own steaks. He made an interesting point about burgers -- an obvious one, in hindsight, but an interesting one nonetheless: places that cook all their burgers well done (e.g., Five Guys, In-and-Out Burger, etc.) ought to be considered in a separate category from restaurants where you can get burgers cooked to order. That's a distinction Matt and I didn't make when we listed our top five burger places². Jimmy also noted how difficult it is for restaurants to do something seemingly so simple: consistently cook a burger to order. I mentioned that celebrity chef Bobby Flay's Burger Palace doesn't seem to be able to do this. His stated M.O. is to cook the burgers medium but you have good odds of getting your burger bloody or overcooked instead. The Ear Inn cooked our medium burgers the way we ordered them. Good burger, but no fries: there's no fryer in the cramped kitchen.

¹The writing on the wall in the photo, next to the arrow, says that the blue line represents the water's edge of the island as it was in 1766.

²Matt's been too busy to post regularly on his eating blog, thanks in part to Launching Innovation, but if he reads this post, he'll have another two burger places to check out when the dust settles.

"I Blog What I Eat"

I had the pleasure of meeting Matt from I Blog What I Eat last night. I found Matt's blog recently when I was looking for a photo of Bobby Flay's new burger place in Paramus (that's Matt's photo I've borrowed above; my digital camera is on the fritz and I've been procrastinating about getting it fixed) and of the new Whole Foods, which is in the same mall, Bergen Town Center¹, in nearby Paramus². Matt was more impressed with the Bobby Blue Burger than I was, but we both like Five Guys and Danny Meyer's Shake Shack, so there's some overlap in our burger joint preferences.

I was going to use the photos of Bobby's Burger Palace and Whole Foods in a post about local businesses that seem to be doing well during the current recession, but I'll make the point here. Both businesses opened outposts in Paramus within the last month, and both seem to be doing pretty well. Every evening we've been by (usually on our way to Whole Foods), there's been a line out the door of Bobby's Burger Palace. The Whole Foods cafe has been consistently busy as well.

¹This mall used to be called the Bergen Mall, and it was the ugly stepchild of malls in Bergen County. Vornado Realty Trust bought it several years ago and spent $171 million renovating it and expanding it.

²I'd remembered reading once that Paramus -- a town of about 25,000 residents -- generated more retail sales than any city in the U.S. aside from Manhattan. Paramus's Wikipedia entry says that, in 2005 Paramus generated more retail sales than any other zip code in the country (which is consistent with what I remembered, since Manhattan has plenty of zip codes, e.g., before the World Trade Center was destroyed, each of the twin towers had its own zip code).