Must be some burger

Jonathon Gold, in the course of praising the new French brasserie Comme Ça, on Melrose in West Hollywood:

The cheeseburger paradigm has shifted a lot of times over the last several years, and I have been privileged to taste most of the contestants, from the Kobe-beef slider at Cut, to Hungry Cat’s pug burger, to the burger at Manhattan’s db Bistro stuffed with foie gras, truffles and braised short ribs. Sang Yoon’s cheeseburger with blue cheese, onion marmalade and bacon may be L.A.’s most popular culinary import since Spago pizza, if not Michel Richard’s tuna burger. We are lucky to live in a city with Tommy’s and Chroni’s, the Apple Pan and Pie ’n’ Burger, Tops and In-N-Out.

But until I am persuaded otherwise, I swear that the best cheeseburger I’ve ever tasted was the one I had for lunch at Comme Ça last Tuesday, a thick, dripping, loosely packed puck of bloody-rare beef, glazed with a quarter inch of good Cheddar, barely but adequately contained in a soft, shiny-crusted hamburger. I am an admirer of both the Orchestrated Crispness and Mannerist Condiment schools of cheeseburger construction, but Comme Ça’s burger is from an older tradition where ingredients are allowed to speak for themselves, unfussy hamburgers that taste like good aged meat. It’s also the only remotely American dish on the menu.

“It’s basically my mother’s hamburger,” chef David Myers confessed when I ran into him later in the week. “It’s what I grew up eating in Ohio.”

That and the usual brasserie fare, from oysters and steak-frites to frisee salad with bacon and poached eggs.