Ella Funt

Ella Funt is a modern French restaurant and late-night bar on East 4th Street, under the culinary direction of Alexandros Gkoutsi, named for the drag artist who performed at Club 82 in the basement below. We went once, in July 2026, and ate the Ella Burger.

The sauce was the best thing about it. Chopped cornichons ran through it and brought the acidity the burger needed against its richer elements, with a small amount of heat behind them adding another dimension without pushing the thing into spicy territory. That sauce is most of what gave the burger its identity, and it is a genuinely good one. We read it as a benedict sauce, or a close cousin of one, which is why our notes filed the burger under that name — but the restaurant does not publish the build, so treat that as our reading rather than a confirmed fact. The cornichons in it we are sure of.

There was a cheese under all that, melted across the patty. We could not place it at the table; the build is aged cheddar.

The bun is where it came apart. It was massive, far too chewy, and far too bready, and the chew is what made it worse than its size alone would suggest, because the bread stayed in the bite long after everything else had gone. Rather than framing the filling, it surrounded it.

The beef could not answer that. It was not especially juicy and it never took the center of the burger, which is a different criticism from saying it was bad. It was simply too quiet to counterbalance that much bread. Put those together and the construction stopped reading clearly as a beef-centered burger at all, which is the real problem here rather than bun size on its own.

A smaller, softer bread component would have left the sauce exactly as distinctive as it was and let the beef come forward. The idea was sound. The proportions were not.

Ordering notes, and they are unusual. Ella Funt does not currently publish a menu: the menu link on its own site resolves to nothing, and the only first-party menu document we could retrieve is from 2023, three years before our visit, and lists no burger at all. Ask for the Ella Burger. It runs $28 and is built on a wagyu double patty with aged cheddar on brioche. Our own notes had it filed as a Burger Benedict, which is not a name the restaurant uses, so do not order it that way. Because there is no published menu, we cannot tell you whether it is still available. Ask before you go.

Ella Funt separates itself through a distinctive sauce in which cornichon acidity and restrained heat give the burger real character. The flavor concept is stronger than the physical construction.

An oversized, chewy bun dominates too many bites, and the beef lacks the juiciness and presence to restore the balance. What holds it here is that the idea and the sauce are genuinely good, and what holds it down is that the burger stops reading as a burger.