{"id":458,"date":"2012-06-12T03:07:48","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T03:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/?p=458"},"modified":"2012-06-12T03:07:48","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T03:07:48","slug":"zen-and-the-art-of-the-peanut-butter-bacon-double-cheeseburger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/2012\/06\/zen-and-the-art-of-the-peanut-butter-bacon-double-cheeseburger\/","title":{"rendered":"Zen and the Art of the Peanut Butter Bacon Double Cheeseburger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lonely Planet says it best: \u201cSorry; scrape the brains back into your ear, because we just blew your mind<\/em>. That\u2019s right: looks like a cheeseburger, but that ain\u2019t melted cheddar on top. Honestly, it\u2019s great: somehow the stickiness of the peanut butter complements the char grilled edge of the meat. There\u2019s lots of other awesome burgers on the menu, but it\u2019s incumbent on you, dear traveler, to eat the native cuisine of a city. In Hanoi, there\u2019s Pho, in Marrakech, Tagine; and in New Orleans: peanut butter and bacon burger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lucy and I have eaten in some pretty fancy restaurants over our years of living in London and New York, and we have always tried to keep the concept of value<\/em> separate from the hard fact of price<\/em>. We will happily spend a little more on a really excellent meal for a special occasion than on a merely average one. But how much more? And given exponential prices at the top end, how far does the relationship stretch? Is an oversized steak in NYC at $33 really ten times as tasty as a Big Mac at $3.29? (let\u2019s just say we don\u2019t eat much steak). We once ate a meal at the Fat Duck in the UK which marred fine dining for us ever since, by establishing a reference price point at which everything you are served has to make you laugh<\/em>. D\u00e9cor is a different matter again. Let\u2019s just say that we once had a good but (predictably) expensive and (predictably) not great meal in a restaurant in Las Vegas with $100m of Picassos on the walls.<\/p>\n

So this brings us to New Orleans. Ah, New Orleans \u2013 home of Crawfish, Gumbo, Jambalaya and the Deep Fried Oyster Sandwich. We had been happily scoffing smoked ribs for a few days in Nashville and Memphis and thought that our diet was perhaps missing a little \u2026 class (that well known food group). There are a number of fine restaurants in the Big Easy that reinterpret Cajun cooking for the squeamish, and we had two wonderful nights out at Bayonna and K Paul\u2019s: frog leg buffalo wings, jerk duck, rabbit jambalaya and snickers tarts were washed down with a (half) bottle of Chateau Musar and the occasional mint julep refugee from Kentucky. It was very, very good.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t great<\/em>. For that, you have to accompany us to a couple of deep, dark dives which shall remain nameless for fear of too many tourists like us. Huge expanses of deep fried chicken livers in grape jelly, a deep fried oyster sandwich as big as my arm, and crawfish jambalaya which may or may not have contained relatives of the large dark rat we saw in the small dark corner. Perhaps it was the shock of eating an only-one-a-day-sized meal for less than $15 a head. Perhaps it was the old adage that the very best food is eaten when you are truly hungry. Whatever. In New Orleans, cheap and dirty is definitely the way to go.<\/p>\n\n\t\t