On a snowy day last week, I stopped by Eyrie for lunch. I forgot my glasses at home, so as I scanned the menu, I couldn’t make out all the words…but I could recognize the word “hamburger,” so that’s what I got.
I am so glad I forgot my glasses at home. If I hadn’t, I might have been able to read the other options, and I might have been tempted to order something a little more adventurous, like the Moroccan Spiced Chicken Pita or the Pan Seared Duck Breast on a Wild Rice Pancake, both of which I later found on the Eyrie menu online, and both of which would have been very appealing.
But man, it turns out, Eyrie makes a beautiful hamburger.
We’re all so accustomed to mediocre hamburgers that one this good really stands out. At Eyrie, it’s all about the ingredients and composition.
The bun is from Red Hen, an onion challah, light and fluffy and with just a hint of oniony flavor that matches up with the caramelized onion aioli spread on the meat.
The meat for the Eyrie hamburger is grass-fed beef, which I would not have guessed because it was very juicy. Much grass-fed beef is kind of dry (grass doesn’t fatten the steers up the way corn feed does). This beef was grilled to a perfect medium rare: it was not cold in the center, and a little heat had made it through to the center of the patty to tighten up the inner meat: it was very moist and flavorful and not at all mushy (sometimes a problem with medium-rare that tends too much toward the rare). It tasted like real beef, which one cannot, sadly, say about all hamburgers.
There was a good sharp cheddar over the top of this beef patty…and it was melted. Now, melting the cheese might seem a small thing, but many times I’ve had a cheeseburger where the cheese is just slapped on top. If the cheese isn’t melted, it creates a chewy, latex-like layer over the burger: no good. As you probably know, Eyrie is a food service teaching environment of Robert Morris University, and I saw the instructor eyeing all the food that came out of the kitchen; to one sandwich, I distinctly heard her say, “Is the cheese melted.” That’s a good lesson for her students to learn, and apparently some have learned it.
This was a beautifully composed hamburger, as you can see from the cross-sections in the photograph. All the elements – pickles, onions, tomato – are carefully place around the burger, not just slopped on.
Some hamburgers are so big that I have to use my knife and fork to eat them; this hamburger was large but the bun was sufficiently airy to allow me to compress it just a little so that comfortable bites could be had.
Quality doesn’t come cheap, and this is not a cheap hamburger. It comes with a smallish container of housemade sweet potato chips, which goes some way toward justifying the $13 price tag, which is not way out of bounds, but almost three times the price of a burger at Five Guys. Now, I like Five Guys, it’s a decent burger, but for a hamburger made of these high-quality ingredients, well-composed, such as the one made at Eyrie, served in a restaurant rather than a fast food environment, I can’t be too surprised at the list price – and it could be the best hamburger in Oak Park.
