The Brooklyn Paper is on the menu!
Park Slope fast-food joint Burgrito’s is now serving up a new spin on its titular burger-burrito mash-up named for Brooklyn’s best newspaper, after this reviewer went in to try the original and — if I do say so myself — came up with a superior version.
My special adds rice and guacamole in an effort to bring balance to the restaurant’s namesake franken-food, which had previously fallen firmly on the burger side of the burger-burrito spectrum.
It also happens to be delicious, according to the owner.
“This is good,” said Darin Laby, who co-owns of the new Fourth Avenue store with his brother. “No one’s ever thought of this before.”
It all started when my editor ordered me to head down to the eatery between Sackett and Degraw streets to sample the burgrito in the name of journalism.
Being a meat and potatoes guy, I enjoyed the concoction — around 900 calories worth of beef, bacon, pasteurized cheese, French fries, lettuce, tomato, chipotle sauce stuffed inside a flour tortilla — although at $9.99, the price might keep me from coming back for seconds.
But my real gripe with the burgrito is branding what is essentially a bacon-cheeseburger wrap as a novel marriage between Mexican and American cuisines, which it clearly is not.
On a lark, I asked Laby whether customers were able to customize the dish, and he said they could, albeit with an additional $1.50 fee per ingredient.
Naturally I asked for another burgrito, this time with guac and rice, and the result was not only tasty — and, at $12.99, ludicrously expensive — but in my mind, more truly worthy of the name “burgrito” and Laby agreed to add it to the menu for the next month.
Seasoned readers will know that there is a sandwich at Dumbo’s Front Street Pizza named for Brooklyn Paper Editor Emeritus Gersh Kuntzman — an unholy alliance of chicken parm and sauteed spinach — and now-defunct nearby watering hole ReBar also sold an equally awful cocktail of the same name.
But I am a company man, so when Laby asked me what I wanted to name my concoction, I barely hesitated.
“Call it the Brooklyn Paper Special,” I said.
Ask for the Brooklyn Paper Special at Burgrito’s [173 Fourth Ave. between Degraw and Douglass streets in Park Slope (718) 313–0877, www.burgr
