They Got Game

It’s not like Park Slope really needed another burger joint, but I was intrigued by the prospect of Bareburger, the mini-chain that just opened a new outpost on Seventh Avenue and First Street.

While the business trumpets its virtues of organic produce, free-range meats and recycled/sustainable furnishings, it was the variety of meat on the menu that caught my game-loving attention. Ostrich, elk, and bison sit right up there with more prosaic patties like beef, turkey, and lamb.

But a part of me was skeptical. Does exotic game really make for a better burger, or is this just a gimmick introduced to stand out from the ever-growing hordes of New York’s hamburger elite? I paid Bareburger a visit and ordered the ostrich and elk burgers to find out.

The restaurant has a splendid variety of toppings, with particular configurations recommended for each type of meat. For ostrich, it’s bacon, bleu cheese, sautéed mushrooms, grilled onions, lettuce, and peppercorn steak sauce. One of the options for elk involves pepper jack, jalepeno relish, and chipotle ketchup. The other is basically a ruben with an elk patty thrown in.

Fearing that all those robust toppings could interfere with the pure meaty meatness we were seeking, my companion and I ordered the simplest configuration on the menu: the Classic Bareburger, which just comes with a little pickle relish, grilled onions, and ketchup. Because these were very lean cuts of meat, we ordered both medium-rare.

Unfortunately, even those most minimal toppings managed to overwhelm the game experience. Neither meat had a particularly distinctive taste when eaten as part of the burger.

Pinching off a piece of the ostrich patty to savor it on its own, I did get a faint hint of an offalish taste, a tiny bit like goose liver. The beigey-gray patty itself was not enormously appetizing, though. It had a slightly mushy, mealy texture, perhaps due to a too-fine grind.

The elk burger had a coarser, more appealing texture and a little bit more of a gamey, mineral funk to it when tasted on its own. It arrived dripping red juice, so was a little shy of the medium-rare mark.

The verdict: as burgers go, these fellas were just fine, not spectacular—and the elk was better than the ostrich.

If you actually want to eat ostrich or elk for the taste of the meat, however, this is hardly the best venue for it, as any distinctive game flavors were overwhelmed by the even the minimalist trappings of Bareburger’s most bare-bones version. They were also expensive for little 6-ounce sandwiches: the elk is $9.90 and the market-priced ostrich was $12.95 on the day I went. Fries are separate.

On the other hand, if you want to eat a patty that is 12 to 16 percent leaner than the Bareburger beef burger (itself already 88 percent lean), I guess these will do you right. You can even get it in an iceburg lettuce wrap instead of a bun, though all that bacon and cheese and pastrami might counteract it.

Philosophically, Bareburger has a better point: at least they’re diversifying our meat options and providing an alternative to the hormone-addled cornfed horrors of factory-farmed beef.