San Matteo

San Matteo is an Upper East Side Italian restaurant that has won the New York City Wine and Food Festival Burger Bash twice, and the burger is built accordingly: Piemonte beef, quadrelo di bufala, caramelized onions, radicchio, and smoked bacon on a pizza dough bun.

Several things are right. The pizza dough bun is great. The buffalo milk cheese adds creamy richness, funk, and umami, and the sweet and savory play against it works.

Then the sweetness compounds. Caramelizing the onions is a choice. Caramelizing the radicchio too, and then serving both on a bread that is itself sweet, means three of the burger's components are pushing the same direction with nothing acidic, sharp, or bitter to interrupt them.

The beef pays for it. This is good Pat LaFrieda meat and we could barely taste it through what was on top, and the patty ran a bit dry. The burger was also still under salted, despite everything the cheese brings.

The shape of the experience tells the story. A good first bite and a back half that was tough going. Our read is that this works better as a competition slider than as a full-size burger you sit down with, which is not a throwaway line at a two-time Burger Bash winner. A few bites of something this rich is a completely different proposition.

We enjoyed it. We would not order it as a meal.

The cheese and the bun are both genuinely good, and the construction is unlike anything else we have eaten, which is worth something.

What pulls it down is that the burger buries its own beef. Two caramelized components and a sweet bun with no acid against them means the meat never registers, and under our methodology the patty being unreachable is the most serious problem a burger can have.