The burger: The classic, slider-scaled La Belle Vie lamb burgers have been resurrected, in all of their flavorful glory, at P.S. Steak, the restaurant now occupying that hallowed dining ground at 510 Groveland. The decision was a no-brainer for Mike DeCamp — he's culinary director for Jester Concepts, the ownership behind P.S. Steak, as well as Monello, Parlour and others. That's because DeCamp spent more than a decade in the La Belle Vie kitchen with chef/owner Tim McKee.
"The lamb burger was my favorite thing, ever, on the La Belle Vie lounge menu," said DeCamp. "I wanted to pay homage to the past, and the lounge was the perfect spot for us to do that. The lamb burger was one of the first dishes that I helped Tim come up with, and we ate so many of them. It's nice to bring it back."
If a Moroccan gastropub served a slider, it would probably resemble this classic Twin Cities burger, although no gastropub could ever resemble the lounge at P.S. Steak, still one of the region's most beautiful dining-and-drinking refuges. They're an ideal bar snack: easily shareable, because there's two of them, and just four or five diminutive bites. And because the patty is fashioned with lamb — and fluent in the language of Mediterranean flavors that were spoken in the La Belle Vie kitchen — they're a welcome departure from the double patty/American cheese format that dominates our current burger climate.
The patty — thin, and burnished by the kitchen's char-producing grill — is ground lamb, seasoned with a bit of ras el hanout and salt. "A regular beef burger wouldn't fit at La Belle Vie," said DeCamp. "We were never going to do a cheeseburger at La Belle Vie, we were always going to do something different. Lamb is a little more fancy than beef, and La Belle Vie was a little more fancy than your average restaurant. All the things that are on the lamb burgers came from Tim and I talking about what goes with lamb."
Including one of the great burger garnishes of all time, a roasted poblano pepper, which contributes sweet-hot notes and a bit of vegetable crunch. Instead of draping the patty with cheese, the dairy realm is represented with mint-flecked yogurt.
The buns diverge from the standard burger bun expectations. They resemble one of my favorite childhood food memories, the soft, yeasty and slightly sweet dinner rolls that my grandmother Hedvig would bake, nine at a time, in a square baking pan.
In the P.S. kitchen, they're produced on a larger scale — 35 at a time, in half-sheet pan — and they're fantastic. "We let them over-proof a little bit, and add more sugar than you normally would," said DeCamp. "Then we grill them on the cut side, to give them a little different texture."
Why the slider format? "Because it's more elegant," said DeCamp. "Two smaller items are more elegant than one big thing. And I know I'm talking out of the side of my mouth, because if you go to the other side of town [he's referring to the burger at Parlour], it's a big burger, and it's super-popular. I don't really prefer one style over the other. But the slider, it just fit the place at the time, and it still does."
