Lavaux

The Lavaux Wine Bar is a Swiss wine and fondue bar on Hudson Street, and its Raclette Burger is the most literal expression of that identity: a grass-fed patty under melted Swiss raclette, with a full slice of raw onion, a signature sauce studded with cornichons, on a black poppy-seed bun.

The raclette is the best thing about it. High-quality Swiss cheese, and we liked it enough that we intend to go back and order it on its own. Bites with plenty of it and plenty of the soft poppyseed bun genuinely felt like eating fondue.

The problem is weight, and it follows from the concept. Raclette is a melting cheese built to be the centre of a dish, and used on a burger it behaves that way. It coats everything. A build that rich needs a serious counterweight, and the chopped cornichons in the sauce are exactly the right instinct in the wrong quantity. We wanted considerably more of them.

The patty pays for that. It is high-quality grass-fed beef and it is buried. For us the patty is the most critical element of any burger, and here we could not really get to it.

Every individual element of this burger is delicious and the assembly is not balanced. It is a genuinely unique thing to eat and worth trying once for what it is.

Two things we could not verify and so are not stating as fact: our notes describe a small daily count of these burgers, and they attribute the bun to the same bakery Red Hook Tavern uses. Neither could be confirmed from the restaurant.

The components here are individually excellent, and on cheese quality alone this is one of the more distinctive burgers in the city.

What holds it down is that they do not combine. A cheese this rich needs a counterweight the build does not supply, and the result is that the beef, which should be the leading flavor, cannot be found underneath it.