It’s not too often you find a restaurant, even in New York City, where most of the menu is organic food. So when I stumbled upon Organique, located in Gramercy, even the name made me think, “What a great play on words!” Immediately I began hoping the food was half as good as the very witty name of the restaurant. Taking my time to closely look at the Organique menu for the first time had me impressed. Its website was mostly user-friendly. And as you would expect in NYC, the food is delivered. My wife and I couldn’t wait for it to arrive!
What’s the Rush!
The food was delivered quickly, only too quickly. In larger than usual pica, the website said that the food would get to us in an hour. It arrived in twenty-five minutes.
Now some of you may be thinking, “What’s wrong with that?”
Nothing if you don’t take people or business at its word, and don’t want to run a quick errand prior to the food arriving.
Whether or not Organique gives itself an extra half hour to prepare the food and deliver it, I can’t say. What I can say is that if it does, that’s a disorderly way to do business.
OK so, not too big of a deal. I continued out the door to get drinks, as I had been when the food arrived. Organique offers mostly different types of organic tea and coffee. The few other offerings weren’t to our liking, nor did we believe they would nicely complement the delectable-sounding burgers we ordered.
A Dash of Hope Dashed
After quickly making it to and from Whole Foods in fifteen to twenty minutes, hurrying and hoping all the way the burgers would still taste almost as good as they would have had we eaten them hot, our craving for food half as good as the witticism displayed in the naming of the restaurant was soon dashed.
My wife ordered the Tuna Burger, with wasabi mayonnaise and organic pickled cucumber ginger relish.
My wife loves tuna steak, yet after inquiring prior to ordering if the burger was a tuna steak, she thought she would take a chance on the freshly ground tuna steak concoction with which Organique looked to hook people.
She liked it OK, maybe even a little better than OK. However, I highly suspect my wife’s “little better than OK” was coming more from a place of trying to keep my spirits up about my disappointment with Organique and less from what her palate was telling her.
I ordered the Beef Burger, with crisp bacon, cheddar cheese and BBQ sauce.
What really killed the burger for me was the unsavory whole wheat bun. I could get past the almost complete lack of flavor to the beef and the rest of the fixings, but the flavor of the bun certainly detracted from the whole burger.
It’s not even that I have an aversion to whole wheat buns, or anything whole wheat. The flavor of the bun, however, should never outweigh the flavor of the beef or the rest of the fixings on the burger. The burger got sloppy quick, and not sloppy in a good way either. Since it was largely tasteless, the mess wasn’t enjoyable.
Even the BBQ sauce wasn’t very flavorful, as in a lack of any real BBQ flavor. What little cheddar cheese there was on the burger, wasn’t sharp, like I was hoping.
The only redeeming things about the burger weren’t its size and price either, but the amount of thicker-than-typical slices of bacon put on it (three, if I’m not mistaken), and that they cooked it perfectly medium-rare. (My wife’s tuna burger was cooked perfectly too.)
We bought into the ballyhoo Organique made about its organic fries and ordered two orders of “AIR BAKED NOT FRIED” organic fries .
Not only did they not look good (they looked very limp and greasy), they tasted as good as they looked; like greasy fries, only without the grease, if you can imagine that. They certainly didn’t look like or taste like I had hoped.
My daughter and I ate them; me, because I hate to waste food, and at least they were filling; her, because she hardly knows better, needing only one hand to count how many times in her young life she’s eaten fries.
Unique in Name Only
I hate to drag the name of a restaurant through the mud, I really do. I prefer even to give a restaurant the benefit of the doubt, and say perhaps it was an off night. I’m well-seasoned in the industry. I understand off nights. I even prefer to give a restaurant the benefit of the doubt in saying, perhaps it was just what we ordered on the menu.
However I find it difficult to do so in this case: too much of the food didn’t add up to anything, both to start with, as well as its end. The bland food we ordered from Organique is a result of it not initially using a good blend of foods to go together, nor blending them together well to make them taste good.
A few examples:
The whole wheat buns that are used for every burger without exception don’t go well with burgers. Even if Organique were to insist on continuing to only use these same whole wheat buns, toast them, butter and grill them, do something with them.
Whether or not Organique makes its own BBQ sauce makes no difference: either way, it has to get better.
Tuna steak ground into a burger is a tough sell to start. If Organique wants to hook people on such a burger, season it better and more.