Lure Fishbar

Lure Fishbar is a SoHo seafood restaurant with a raw bar and a sushi program, and the burger is a genuine menu item rather than a concession. It comes two ways: Bash Style, with cheese, bacon and onion jam, and pickles, or Lure Style with lettuce, tomato, and cheese. We ordered Bash Style. This assessment is based on one visit.

The central fact of the visit is that we did not all eat the same burger. We ordered identically and the patties arrived at different levels of doneness, somewhere between medium and medium rare depending on the plate. That turned one dish into several experiences and is the most useful thing we can tell you about ordering here.

On the burger that came closer to medium, the char on the outside was phenomenal, and it did what a good char should against a sweet sauce. The sauce reads Big Mac adjacent and leaned distinctly onion-forward. The seeded bun was solid and stayed out of the way.

This is one of the very few times you will hear us prefer a burger medium, which is what the chef recommends. Take that advice when you order.

Beyond the char and the sauce, there is nothing here we would call remarkable. It is a good burger at a seafood restaurant and worth ordering if you are already sitting there.

At its best this burger has a genuinely excellent char and a sauce that works with it, which is enough to make it worth ordering.

Two things hold it down. Nothing about it is remarkable past those two components, and the kitchen did not produce the same burger twice within a single order, which turns the experience into a variable rather than a known quantity.