Umami & Sprinkles

First of all, "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" (on Food Network) - what a brilliant concept. It's easy to trust a bunch of food experts (or at least we assume they are because they're on TV) to point you in the direction of delicious food. This may or may not be a completely ingenious new advertising ploy, but that's fine, I'll bite.

Fortunately for me, Giada di Laurentiis lives in Los Angeles, so many of her "Best Things..." come from places I can actually visit if I feel the need to fight LA traffic. A recent suggestion of Giada's, featured on the "Hometown Favorites" episode was the burger at small LA-based burger joint, Umami Burger.

UMAMI is the newest and trendiest "fifth taste," joining the ranks of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy. To be honest, I still don't really understand what Umami is, but I know soy sauce has a lot of it and so do mushrooms. Chew on that.

Always in search of the newest and bestest burger, we decided to give it a try. Why not? It's trendy and old-fashioned all at the same time...cool. Since a trip to Umami Burger (in Hollywood and La Brea and somewhere else) warranted venturing outside of the South Bay bubble, I used the outing as an excuse to also visit the trendy cupcake hotspot, Sprinkles...I've heard its the "best cupcake ever". (FYI...the two aren't really co-located, I just wanted a cupcake).

Interesting to note, this food fest prompted the idea behind this blog, as it was the first time I realized I'm snobby enough to critique the "best of's" and trendiest foods in town. So, without further ado...

UMAMI BURGER

I ordered the Umami burger. They do, by the way, have other burgers, including turkey burgers, but why go to Umami burger for anything but the "Umami Burger"? When there's a specialty, you order the specialty...they want you to...its what they do best. I also ordered fries. "Fat fries, or skinny fries?"..."Fat fries. Definitely fat fries." (This was an unusual choice for me as I tend to prefer skinny fries, but the fat fries looked good in the picture.) To complete the meal, we ordered a rootbeer. FYI...rootbeer with burgers is good...and I don't really like rootbeer.

Let me start on the fat fries - delicious, thick cut pieces of fried potato loveliness, served with a spoonful (literally served in a spoon) of homemade Umami ketchup. The fries are served piping hot, lightly crisped on the outside and gooey on the inside. There's something wonderful about having to blow on a fry; that means its fresh out of the fryer and in the prime of its fry-life. The homemade ketchup has a pleasant, fresh sweetness, like the tomatoes have just recently been roasted. I thoroughly enjoyed the newness of the sweet ketchup flavor, but after awhile I found myself slightly missing the familiar vinegary taste of a commercial ketchup that would normally accompany my salty fries (salt and vinegar...right?)

Moving on to the star of the meal - the Umami Burger. They claim that there are 6 layers of taste in this little burger. It's complex, that's for sure, but much to my appreciation, you don't lose the flavor of the burger. By default, they cook the burger medium rare, which is good and bad. I found the beef on my burger to be quite delicious, with a charred crisp outside and soft flavorful inside. The downside: soggy bun. A bun can make or break a burger experience. Soggy bun is a bad way for a burger to start. The clever playfulness of contrasting flavors and textures found in the combination of toppings is clearly what they expect to shine in this burger, and that it does. Again they feature the sweet roasted tomato flavor, and contrast it nicely with a salty, savory parmesan cheese crisp. A lone shiitake mushroom, the epitome of umami, tops the burger. A brilliant idea foiled by the fact that shiitake mushrooms are relatively tough and difficult to bite through, and therefore only one bite of the burger is actually fortunate enough to benefit from the lovely earthy mushroom flavor, but is, at the same time, overpowered since the mushroom, difficult to sever, is too big for its respective bite (unless you have a huge mouth). The concept of the umami burger really is brilliant and full of potential, in my opinion, with minor improvements to prepration. Despite my heavy critique, this is a wonderful burger, and I thoroughly enjoyed eating mine (soggy bun and all).

On to dessert...

SPRINKLES!

I stood in line for cupcakes. As I was standing in line I had to wonder if I was standing in line for the trendiness that is the Sprinkles cupcake, or the magic that is the Sprinkles cupcake. I hoped for the latter, but expected the former. Once inside, I found the list of flavors on the wall menu to be astounding; the case of available cupcakes contains a disappointing fraction of those flavors. Bummer for me, but brilliant on the part of whoever made their marketing plan, because I'll have to go back to try some of the other flavors! Also disappointing was the lack of SPRINKLES!!! Really, guys? Where are the sprinkles, and what are these multi-colored, modern-looking dots on top of the cakes? Must we really have USC and UCLA representation on a cupcake? Are rainbow sprinkles way too lower class for such upper-crust pastries? I suppose that's what I get for shopping for cupcakes in Beverly Hills...I think I've actually heard the term "luxury cupcakes"...amusing...and only in LA.

In any case, we went for red velvet, pumpkin, black & white, and dark chocolate (the latter two did have some fancy looking chocolate sprinkles, but they were the only ones in the case with sprinkles of any variety). We ended up putting a couple of the cakes in the refrigerator to save for later. Big mistake. Not that we should have eaten all four cakes at one time, but a cupcake should be eaten at room temperature to preserve the texture of the cake and especially the frosting. The cupcakes were absolutely scrumptious, but let me also say that I've rarely met a cupcake (especially chocolate) that I didn't find scrumptious. These did stand out amongst other commercial (and "luxury") cupcakes I've had the pleasure of tasting, in that they choose NOT to send customers straight into Type II Diabetes treatment with a solid sugar blob of frosting bigger than the cupcake itself. The frosting is a bit too sweet for my palette, but at least they avoid the "excess" component of "luxury" in cupcakery.

I'd go back...if I was in the neighborhood...simply for the fact that I'd like to try some of the other flavors. I can bake equally scrumptious cupcakes myself, but I rarely have an assortent of cupcake and frosting flavors laying around my one-bedroom apartment. I would in fact thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to conduct a comparative study of luxury cupcakes in Los Angeles to determine if Sprinkles really does take the cake (the pun, and the cliche involved in using the pun, was intended).