The burger: When chef Scott Pampuch took over at McKinney Roe earlier this summer and began to overhaul the menu, he encountered an immovable obstacle.
"It was basically the third rail of the burger conversation," he said with a laugh. That's because the restaurant's Big Stag burger took home the top prize at the fourth-annual Twin Cities Burger Battle in 2017. Given that champion pedigree, this was one menu item that wasn't going anywhere.
Still, Pampuch wanted to bump up the burger selection. That's when chef de cuisine Niki Heber stepped in.
"He told me, 'You can put whatever you want on the menu, and you can call it whatever you want, but I'm going to do a butter burger,'" said Pampuch.
And that's what happened, with an emphasis on the word butter.
Not just any butter, but a compound butter, enriched with chives, parlsey and tarragon. There are three separate ways that Pampuch and Heber insert that colorful butter into this burger equation.
The first is with the onions. They're thinly shaved sweet yellow onions, sweated low and slow on the stove in copious amounts of that butter.
Part two occurs when the patty is sizzling up a storm on the flat top grill. (It's a half-pound of certified Angus beef, a thick, densely packed bruiser that conspicuously hangs over the edges of the not-so-small bun and is cooked precisely to order.) After the patty is flipped, a heaping helping of that aromatics-enriched butter is placed on top, dissolving into the meat as it finishes cooking.
