Penne Chicken Diavolo and the Hamburger Theory That Failed Me
A Hamburger Loyalist Meets the Penne Chicken Diavolo and Questions Everything
The Blue Plate Special Special Kitchen Restaurant Review by Gary Gardiner
One in a series from The Taste of Westerville Restaurants
I love hamburgers: the ones charred over briquettes on the red brick grill in my childhood backyard; the Mediterranean-flavored, cast-iron-skillet-fried ones no one has been able to duplicate from Louis’ Lunch in the old section of Gainesville; and the ones I slow-smoked for 40 years on a Portable Kitchen aluminum grill in the driveway of our Westerville home.
All were served with the standard sides except for Louis’ burgers, which were best with minimal mustard and a very thin slice of tomato. People still spend hours trying to discover how Louis did it: crispy and crunchy on the outside, moist and tender inside, almost to the edge of uncooked.
That restaurant became one of my personal measures for good burgers. And, of course, so did the ones from my dad’s red brick grill, sitting under the tall pines just beyond the brick patio he’d laid with his own hands — the same hands that built the grill on the land he bought with back pay from the war.
When I go to a restaurant for the first time, I order a hamburger.
That’s my test of a restaurant.
Almost every restaurant has a burger. It’s required. That can be the problem.
If the restaurant has other specialties — Italian, steaks, chicken — I want the burger just to see whether it is considered a throwaway. Something few people order, and those who do are presumed to have no respect for the menu. No respect for the chef. No respect for the idea of fine dining.
That is the opposite of my intention.
Even if the burger is on the menu because it has to be, because it always has been, because some fool will ask for it over the one-inch-thick top sirloin or the Chicken Diavolo or Bolognese, it should receive the same kitchen attention as the chef’s choice.
If it tastes like it was thrown anywhere on the grill for just the required amount of time and comes with shredded lettuce tossed over a bottom bun slathered in a puddle of food-service garlic aioli, I’m going to become a doubter.
I’m going to doubt that this restaurant cares enough about its diners to respect the choice of a lowly hamburger from the menu.
How could this diner choose this foolish sandwich over main-menu dishes with names sometimes unpronounceable, often mispronounced, and sometimes uttered by someone pretending to speak a language they do not know?
My theory of culinary decision-making works best if I go with a group, especially one with eyes larger than their stomachs, so I can sample their leftovers before they make it to the to-go box.
Last week I ordered a hamburger at Napa Kitchen and Bar as a test.
It passed, but barely.
Shredded lettuce.
As the waiter wrote down my hamburger decision and turned away to deliver my fool’s choice to the kitchen, I realized my mistake. I saw Penne Chicken Diavolo at the bottom corner of the menu.
For years, I had been using hamburgers to judge restaurants that were trying to tell me, plainly and politely, what they did best. I had been eating bad hamburgers from menus that offered the chef’s choice as every item. Not hamburgers that were, perhaps, considered the poor next-door neighbors to what might have been the best neighborhood in the city.
I ate my Napa pedestrian burger in silence, reading poetry about mindfulness and longing, drinking the stout beer, lamenting my actions and the fate they had caused me.
Tonight I went back to Napa Kitchen and ordered the Penne Chicken Diavolo.
I’ve been such a fool.
Now I’m looking at my budget and medical history to see how I could do this at least once a week. Or, even better, how I could become the person who comes in every day and asks to be seated by the windows at the back of the restaurant, where there isn’t a table, just an easy chair and a wooden box on its end, large enough to hold a full glass and the plate of Penne Chicken Diavolo that forced me to regret every hamburger I had ordered before it.
I would sit so long with a book in my hand, reading by window light, that the staff would wonder when I was leaving — or whether I was “addled,” as my mother often described family friends who had mental difficulties.
It was that good.
The rich cream sauce carried fresh spinach, tomatoes and red pepper flakes around the chicken and penne in a way that seemed almost conspiratorial, a shared desire to please me in a way the burger couldn’t. The pepper flakes warmed the palate to the edge of difficulty before the creamy sauce pulled back the danger. The chicken was moist, the penne firm. Another balance shared on the plate.
I ate it all, wishing there were some way to rescue the last traces of sauce. A slice of crisp bread would have been perfect, but it didn’t come with the meal.
This was a lesson.
Maybe the chef is right.
No more burgers first for me.
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