Below 14th Street ...

The BEST burger below 14th St., actually the city's best burger period ... (and a correction!)...

I popped into Corner Bistro, which serves one, one, of NYC’s best burgers, and found a mini meta photography session happening. That’s Amanda with ring light who’s shooting the tater tots—she’s in charge of CB’s social media. Who the guy is shooting his burger in the foreground, I don’t now—a barfly getting in on some social media action.

Sometimes you crave a good burger. Hunger for it. Blindly. You want what hamburger scholar George Motz calls “one of the greatest expressions of American gastronomy.”

You want it beefy, and you want it perfectly proportioned, the ideal ratio of bun to beef to condiments. And you want it so juicy you have to catch the drips falling from your chin.

And I believe we’ve found it, the best burger in New York City right now.

But first, the want. I’ve seen it in my wife, this want. When Ann wants a burger, her eyes turn to pinwheels and she sleepwalks toward the nearest cafe. Often that will be the burger at Cafe Cluny, our neighborhood lunch joint.

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Correction: Last Saturday’s newsletter posted a recipe with an incorrect amount of pork for these delicious Asian-style cabbage rolls. This is the corrected version for those who would like to make them. The’re delicious.

Ginger Pork Cabbage Rolls

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We’ve been exploring our hunger for burgers in the Empire City below 14th Street, where the most interesting neighborhoods in the five boroughs thrive. Herewith are five joints (a couple are restaurants) putting out our favorite burgers.

Corner Bistro

Exactly one block away from Cafe Cluny is a bar serving one of the city’s best burgers, a burger mainstay in the West Village: The Corner Bistro.

Burgers and fries and McSorley’s light or dark ale—these are the Corner Bistro’s stock-in-trade. They make the perfect burger of your imagination: fat, grilled over flame, juicy, cheesy, with the standard lettuce, onion, and off-season tomato garnish. It’s reasonably priced, $12.75 for a standard cheeseburger, and enormously satisfying.

Corner Bistro bills itself as “the last of the bohemian bars in West Greenwich Village.” It’s been around so long, our pal, novelist Bill Roorbach, told us he used to get burgers here on credit when he was squatting in an abandoned building nearby, at Hudson and West 14th St in the 1980s. (And I don’t know about the “last” part—The White Horse Tavern is a few blocks away, second oldest bar in the city, or so it claims.)

Emily

Some friends told us about this little place tucked deep in the West Village at the corner of Bedford and Downing Streets.