• Michael Gebert
  • Like a rhinestone cow, boy

The official photographer looked a little miffed that I kept taking photographs of the photographers, especially with my $100 pocket camera, but I got a kick out of it. The most amusing thing, though, was the idea of being lined up in front of a repeating background to have my picture taken with people who’ve been on TV and stuff. I tried to strike a modest pose off to one side, and let the spotlight fall to more naturally beautiful people like Top Chef/The Chew’s Carla Hall (who feels tall as a giraffe when your troll self is standing next to her), Jeff Mauro (who clearly understood that becoming the Sandwich King called for hiring a really good personal trainer), Bon Appetit editor Adam Rapoport (who’s somehow as thin as an exclamation point), and River Roast chef John Hogan—OK, him I might look like, but he has the porkpie hat look going for him.

  • Michael Gebert
  • Delivering a burger topped with a red pepper

And so the burgers started coming. One thing I felt immediately: the toppings could be wildly creative, like the one stuffed with melted leeks or the one with “chicken skin bacon” on top, but if you didn’t nail the fundamentals of a burger, it didn’t matter. One was near raw in the center, some didn’t have any taste of the grill, and many were just too sweet. There are a lot of chefs making onion marmalade and bread-and-butter pickles in-house these days, and using things like balsamic vinegar on a burger, and without a countervailing savory condiment, they all tasted like candy burgers, not robust, beefy burgers.

  • Michael Gebert
  • The Chimi

Again, we didn’t know who they were from, but we seemed to agree on these four as the standouts and wrapped up voting peacefully and quickly. Carla talked about her recently announced plans to open a Nashville-style hot-chicken place in New York, which she said had gotten a lot of negative social media feedback from Nashvillians, to which Brehmer replied, “If Gandhi was on Twitter, people would have tweeted that he was an asshole for promoting nonviolence.”