It’s time to celebrate the most quintessential American food, the hamburger, with the 7th Annual Newport Burger Bender. Forget the classic patty-lettuce-tomato-ketchup combo, because for ten consecutive days, 52 restaurants local to Newport and Bristol Counties are duking it out over ingredients, flavor profiles, and creativity in order to be crowned with the coveted title: Best Burger.
The burgers are featured in three categories: beef, non-beef (including bison, pork, chicken, and seafood), and plant-based. The restaurants are equally as diverse, with many taking on the culinary challenge without the traditional background of being a standard burger joint.
One of these non-traditional contenders is Chef Andy’s burger, the Mata Hambre (Spanish for “kill hunger”), from Newport Vineyards. With only one burger on their normal menu, Newport Vineyards isn’t known for dishing out sliders. But for the recent James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef in the Northeast, creating a burger for the Bender is artistry and fun, part of the joys of cooking.
The Mata Hambre was inspired from his recent vacation to Fajardo, Puerto Rico, where Chef Andy’s best friend (who is also a chef) lives. The burger consists of a “grass-fed beef patty, crispy sofrito pork belly, pickled onions, quince barbeque, queso frito, and island sauce, served on a house-made Mallorca roll.” The name “Mata Hambre” and the concept of using a Mallorca roll were direct inspirations from his friend’s monstrous pulled pork sandwich; the other ingredients are all part of Puerto Rican food and culture, especially the pork belly and sofrito. The Mata Hambre is sweet and savory, with creamy cheese and the Mallorca roll powdered with sugar to cut through the richness of the beef and pork belly and the slight tanginess of the island sauce.
The burger, however, isn’t only Puerto Rican. It’s also a New Englander, a part of what Chef Andy calls “The Program: scratch, New England-based, farm-to-table” food. “The pork bellies are from Blackbird Farm; the beef I ground myself from a steer that grew about a half a mile up the road; the sofrito we grew most of the ingredients; the potatoes were grown on Quonset view; all the pickles were grown on property; the Mallorca roll was made here with King Arthur flour out of Maine; the cheese was Narragansett Creamery; the quince was from Rocky Brook [Orchard] that we picked,” explains the chef. “We are a grape farm. If you don’t support who you are, then you’re kind of hypocritical,” he reiterates, insisting that the entire concept of his food – his burger – is about community, and uplifting each other from the very ground up.
With 52 other burgers in the competition – 38 of them in the beef category – Chef Andy isn’t looking to win the Bender: “That’s why I try to make something that’s so wild. I win when I go through the pictures [on Instagram].” It’s also a win for him, he notes, if he inspired other chefs to be creative with their burgers “because [then] we elevate everybody.”
In direct competition with Chef Andy and the Newport Vineyards (in the beef burger category) is Chef Mariana from La Vecina Taqueria and her La Vecina Smash Burger. La Vecina Taqueria is a bit of a Bender “dark horse;” not only a Mexican restaurant known for its authentic flavors and dishes (as opposed to American hamburgers), La Vecina Taqueria is a brand-new participant to the Burger Bender.
Chef Mariana’s La Vecina Smash Burger is crafted with two 3-ounce patties, bacon jalapeño jam, chorizo aioli, spicy cabbage, crispy cheese, and queso fresco served on a potato roll. A truly Mexican-American meal, this burger takes all the necessary elements of a traditional American hamburger and imbibes in it Mexican flavors and flair.
While Chef Mariana was not around to directly comment, her take on the traditional burger spoke for itself: good textures from crunchy cabbage and juicy smashed patties were the base for a mouthful of melding flavors, with bold bacon and jalapeño, all mellowed out with creamy cheese. All of which shows that all these restaurants are bringing top-tier competition.
Showcasing his skills in a more “alternative” take on a burger, Chef Steve from The Beehive Café opted to be one of just five restaurants serving a plant-based burger. The Beehive Veggielicious Burger is comprised of “succulent roasted cremini mushrooms and protein-packed black beans with tangy pickled onions and creamy garlic aioli. The star of the show is melty ‘cheese’ crafted from roasted potatoes, carrots, and pine nuts for a decadent, dairy-free delight.”
Chef Steve is not a vegan. And The Beehive Café is not a vegan- or vegetarian-only restaurant. The chef, who was cooking since he was just three years old in the back of his father’s pizza parlor and was mentored under a national barbequing champion, fell into plant-based cooking because of his culinary philosophies: food as a love language for him means that everyone should be able to enjoy his recipes, and cooking from scratch (no store-bought ingredients, like dairy-free cheese) is just as important. “We do 90 percent of [food] from scratch here. […] I’m not a vegan, but we’ve had vegan kids work here, and then it was always a challenge to make this dish that everybody loves, but make it vegan,” he says.
The other part of crafting a good (vegan) recipe is research. The Veggielicious has been in the making for two years, and the goal of the burger is not just to win the Bender, but to break down the stigma behind vegan food by doing so. Instead of trying to make his plant-based burger taste like meat, the Veggielicious is simply a burger “that happens to be vegan.” For skeptics, Chef Steve tells people that the taste is “very earthy,” and the cheese brings a creaminess to balance it out. “The pickled red onions I make in-house gives it that bite, and the aioli gives it more creaminess and some garlicky flavor,” he says. “I don’t want to tell people ‘Oh, it’s vegan.’ That’s not the selling point.” What the chef says holds true, and the word that comes to mind while eating the burger is “rich.” There isn’t anything fake about the dish – even the “cheese” is rich and creamy, without the usual odd dairy-free aftertaste – it isn’t trying to be like a meaty burger, it’s just a good one.
Like Chef Andy and Newport Vineyards, Chef Steve tries to stay local with his ingredients. For this burger, the mushrooms come from RI Mushrooms, and the microgreen topping comes from Holy Trinity School in Fall River.
With 52 total burgers to taste, and only ten days to do it, everyone in Rhode Island should come hungry, stay hungry, and keep an open mind while tasting the best and most creative burgers these chefs can cook up. Voting is already open. May the best burger win.
