Dining Out / Small burgers make for great fun

Tel Aviv's recently opened Burgerim restaurant says its hamburgers are modeled on New York City's Pop Burger chain, which is known for its 80-gram mini-burgers served in pairs or trios with a selection of sauces. While Pop Burger joints are super trendy and somewhat upscale, Burgerim is a rather old fashioned looking place, with a few tables set indoors, stools set at an outdoor counter, and an order counter.

One wall is decorated with posters for various pop music concerts, another with a large menu. The closest Burgerim comes to being "fancy" is the plastic cups in which the various sauces are served.

As a recent visit proved, however, that's all fine with me, for these mini-burgers are great fun to eat. The burgers are made by hand and grilled to order, unlike machine-made fast-food or junk-food burgers.

My order was for a trio of burgers, one beef, one mutton and one of merguez sausages. My burgers were prepared precisely as requested, each lightly charred on the exterior and medium-rare inside. Each was served on its own lightly toasted, sesame seed-coated roll, the rolls with just a hint of sweetness and on each a slice of tomato, a bit of onion and shredded lettuce.

The beef burger was full of natural flavor and I downed it with hot mayonnaise sauce slathered on. The mutton burger was just fatty enough and went nicely with barbecue sauce; and the merguez burger was fine with nothing more than a bit of ketchup and hot sauce spread on.

I requested side orders of fries and onion rings. The fries, which came in a very generous portion, were a delight, potatoes that had been cut into thin ovals before deep frying. The fries were left with just a hint of oil to add charm. I did not resist the temptation of eating these with my fingers, some of which I sprinkled over with nothing more than salt and others of which were dipped into the hot mayonnaise.

The coated and deep fried onion rings were little more than okay, having far too much resemblance to the uniform things that are sold out of freezer cases.

All in all, Burgerim is great fun for a casual meal and certainly at the right price, as my bill, which included a draft Goldstar beer, came to a most reasonable NIS 72. Not worth a special trip but if you're in the area and feel hungry, a good bet either for lunch or late snack during the wee hours of the morning.

Burgerim: 7 Herzl St., Tel Aviv (near the corner of Rothschild). Open daily 11:30-04:30. Tel: (03) 5166651

As noted in the review above, not all fast food has to be junk. Despite that, as a visit to the recently opened Laboratorio di Pasta demonstrated, a great deal of fast food that tries to pass as authentic or even gourmet can be pretty disappointing.

The concept of the Laboratorio is a good one - a small place offering a choice of just a few pasta dishes, a selection of sauces to go with them, a few salads and a cold dessert.

The modus operandi at this small eatery is to place your order at the counter, take a seat at one of the benches or stools at the few tables, and then pick up your food on a plastic tray when your name is called.

Unfortunately, the concept is not executed very well, partly because in addition to the trays, the forks and drinking glasses are also made of plastic. Even the Italian grissini (or bread sticks) that come to the table arrive in a plastic package.

And if the plastic is not enough, the pasta dishes are served in round, deep cardboard containers, all of which harms the dining experience.

I tried two pasta dishes. The first was potato gnocchi in a mushroom cream sauce topped with Parmesan cheese. The gnocchi, imported frozen from Italy, as is all of the pasta here, might have started off well enough but the sauce was so thick that it reminded me (and tasted something like) the white paste that children use for arts and crafts, making the gnocchi stick together in an unappealing mass.

The other dish I sampled was tortellini - broad pasta stuffed with what the menu said was a mixture of porcini mushrooms and Parmesan cheese.

Although I could recognize mushrooms here, I found not even a hint of the rich earthy flavor of porcini. To make things worse, largely because of the shape of the cardboard container in which the dish was served, the alio olio sauce of garlic and oil had sunk to the bottom, leaving the pasta on the top dry and sticky on the palate.

To add to my problem, the sauce was far too watery and had far too little flavor.

The grissini and the small antipasti-like salad I tried, of fried, marinated eggplant, squash and red pepper, complemented by small cubes of feta cheese, was the most rewarding part of my meal.

Only one wine is offered here, Codornieu Cava, and although it was perfectly acceptable, it did amuse me that I had to drink it out of a plastic cup.

My bill came to a mere NIS 70 to which 200 cl. bottles of the Cava added NIS 17 each. Those would have been excellent prices if only the food had been better. Takeaway is also offered. When it comes to pasta for either dining out or takeaway, I can think of quite a few places which are far better.

Laboratorio di Pasta: 91 Hashmonaim St., Tel Aviv. Open daily 11:00-23:00. Tel: (03) 5616116.