I actually ate three members of the animal kingdom at this Better Burger, and none of them were a cow. The flies and rat pieces that are probably in most NYC food notwithstanding, I ate two birds and one mammal. And if you guessed chicken as one of my fowl conquests, you’d be totally squawking up the wrong tree. Okay, one is a turkey. Duck? Nope. Pheasant? At a burger place–please. The second was bison. And the third was a very tall flightless bird that’s not an emu. Okay, it’s ostrich–which taste surprisingly not like chicken, but more like beef. The bison (or buffalo) is like a leaner beef and the turkey is, well, like turkey. The turkey was actually the driest of the three, the bison the juiciest and the ostrich the tastiest. They do tend to overcook their burgers a bit, which is kind of annoying, as taking them to go dries them out even more, but they do make for tasty nuggets with their whole-wheat buns, lettuce, onions and tomatoes. Their air fries are kind of bullshit. They’re flaccid at best, and could really do with a couple minutes in the fatty stuff. This place never seems too busy, which I find surprising in this neighborhood. Maybe when you’re this close to the 99-cent pizza place, they siphon off some of the crowd not willing or able to spend ten or eleven bucks on a relatively small burger and fries. [MF]
