I Tried Ina Garten's Favorite Cheeseburger

Plus, Jonestown massacre site tourism, an iconic church not named Notre Dame reopens, and people really, really love Santa.

Dec 15, 2024

I’ve never had a reason to question the taste of Ina Garten, the celebrity chef known by her Barefoot Contessa moniker.

Cooking shows weren’t something I watched, and the few times I baked from her recipes I had no complaints. Her cheeky but jovial persona I glimpsed now and then in viral clips came across as authentically endearing. And I’m not a stan of any celebrity, so her alleged snub of Martha Stewart gets no rise from me.

I never had a reason, that is, until a couple of weeks ago when I tried a burger that Garten said was the best she’d ever had.

To rewind a bit to a couple of months ago, Garten got me very excited. In an interview promoting her memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens at the Kennedy Center, Garten was asked by an audience member what the best cheeseburger she’d ever had was. Now, maybe she was playing to the crowd. Or perhaps she didn’t feel like plumbing the depths of her memory. But Garten responded, “I had it this afternoon: It was in the Four Seasons. Is it called Bourbon Steak? Oh my god.”

I swiftly put it into that week’s newsletter. After all, everybody likes hearing about “the best,” whether it be pizza, pillows, airline reward programs, or haircare. But Garten picked something in D.C., a city that often gets sneered at for cuisine. It’s also where I live, which meant I could go and try it.

Fast forward and I’m seated in the dated environs of Bourbon Steak at the Four Seasons surrounded by a D.C. lunch crowd (nondescript men and women in nondescript office attire) eagerly awaiting my two burgers. Why two burgers? While I do love a burger and my typical Shake Shack order is two double Shackburgers and a strawberry shake, I wasn’t pigging out today. (If you think that’s bad wait till you hear what I used to order at McDonald’s on the bus rides back from away games in High School.) Well, Garten didn’t specify which of the two on the menu she ordered. There is the Prime Steak—which I’m guessing is the one—which comes with cheddar, a red wine shallot compote, and shredded little gem lettuce for $26. And then there is the Wagyu Double Burger, accompanied by American cheese, and sauteed onions for $28.

One bite into each, and I was crushed. The Prime Steak was fine—the meat juicy and a good thickness. But there was nothing remarkable about its flavor or consistency or toppings. After taking a first bite I didn’t have to be restrained from inhaling the rest. If you’re more of a meat purist, this one is for you. I’m not sure there was much seasoning, if any at all. The Wagyu was far more flavorful—probably fattier—but too dry for my liking. If you like smashburgers, it’s more your thing as it’s sort of that style. But again, not a burger that would rank in the top 100 I’ve ever had. Or top 1,000.

Neither was toeing the line of messiness, nor was the texture something more impressive than something you’d grill at home. There was a certain burger-y-ness missing from them. I now have to ask if Garten has had many burgers.

The best part was probably that despite being at the Four Seasons they were only $26 and $28 apiece.

I didn’t set out to hate on Garten or the Four Seasons. Once I had it in my head that this might be “the best burger,” everybody was already sort of screwed. I’ve learned to ask friends and family not to hype up a movie, a city, or a restaurant because expectations affect our experiences way more than most of us realize. That’s especially the case for travel. The restaurant you discover on accident has a much higher chance of pleasing your low expectations than one your friend insisted to you a thousand times will change your life.

Two of the trips I’ve enjoyed the least in my life were to two countries for which I had sky-high expectations—Japan and Cuba. (Obviously, those expectations were not the same for each country.) Even though I managed to enjoy myself, I was and still am frustrated by how impossible I found it to extricate myself from what I’d imagined. Whereas some of the getaways I treasure the most have been to spots I didn’t know what to think beforehand—Slovenia, Western Australia, Aswan, Mumbai, and Guanajuato.

DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES

It’s gotten nowhere near the level of the press coverage as Notre Dame, but a church with nearly the same stature in Rome just reopened after its own extensive cleaning and restoration. The Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo houses works from a star-studded cast: Bernini, Bramante, Caravaggio, Raphael, Carracci, and Maderno. Tucked next to the gate entrance to the Piazza del Popolo, it is one of the greatest examples of Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture in the world. It’s where I had drilled into me the importance and pleasure one should derive from seeing artwork in its intended location.

The Cerasi Chapel before the restoration

One of the side chapels, the Cerasi Chapel, was designed by Maderno and has two paintings by Caravaggio on either side of the altar. The Crucifixion of Saint Peter is on the left. The lighting and foreshortening are so dramatic it almost feels like Christ might slide right off the cross. And on the right is the Conversion of Saint Paul. Both paintings were painted with the intention that viewers would see them from below and the side—an experience that would be lost if they sat in a museum gallery. Also housed in the basilica is the Chigi Chapel, designed by Raphael and completed by Bernini. I feel no qualms about this restoration—Baroque architecture and decoration that has lost its shine is not being experienced as it is intended.

Despite having covered the travel industry for nearly a decade now, I still find myself surprised by people and what they want. Take the latest poster child for the ills of overtourism—Rovaniemi. Never heard of it? It’s the capital of Lapland in Finland and the so-called “official hometown of Santa Claus.” Now, I loved Santa Claus as a child and as the oldest of five children, I got to hold onto the myth a lot longer than most because it had to be kept going for the youngest. But even I found myself thunderstruck at the number of people who travel to this city on the edge of the Arctic Circle—1.2 million in 2023! That was a 30% increase from 2022. And a whopping 600,000 of those went to the Santa Claus Village Theme Park. The numbers for 2024 are expected to be even higher as airlines added THIRTEEN new flight routes this year to Rovaniemi.

Dark tourism is another area I often find myself having mixed feelings. (Dark tourism is tourism focused on places where significant death or suffering took place.) Obviously, a place like Auschwitz is an important learning experience, and I almost went to Chernobyl when I was in Ukraine years ago. But now Guyana is opening up the site of the Jonestown massacre—where the U.S. reverend Jim Jones and nearly 1,000 of his followers (including children) died in the largest murder-suicide in history—for tourism. Tours are already starting next month and cost $650 a person.

I liked this bit of advice from Rick Steves in his profile in the New York Times:

“One thing I love as a writer is, you can’t go back to the United States and write it up. You’ve got to write it up right there, in the humid, buggy reality with all the cacophony of culture all around you. That’s where you take your notes and it’s most vivid.”

But I found the rest of the profile maddening and contradictory. On the one hand, Steves is doing the classic dance of looking down his nose at travel in the social media age. He’s bewildered, he claims, by all the people who travel because they want to take a selfie in front of something or go somewhere because they’ve seen everybody else go there. But then the topic shifts to places where he has caused overcrowding, like Cinque Terre. And Steves seems unable to grapple with either a) that he’s part of the problem and still profits from driving people to the same places and b) that the mentality of people going to places off of social media is no different than the mentality of people going based on guide books. Then there’s this bizarre rift about how Cinque Terre has changed:

Speaking of overtourism, the war on lockboxes hit a new low (or high) last week when Italy banned lockboxes. I’m hard-pressed to see this large-scale pushback against AirBnb and Vrbo ending any time soon. Popular cities aren’t going to be building housing any time soon, especially not of the historic type beloved by its citizens and visitors. So the only choice will be slowly wrest them back for the people who call these places home. Where the line is between pulling enough back versus hurting residents’ pocketbooks will be interesting to see. For instance, New York City is already reconsidering loosening its harsh crackdown on Airbnb.

I find the U.S. struggle to build significant infrastructure of any kind, let alone high-speed rail, so depressing I don’t want to spend time here on it. But it’s especially depressing when countries far less wealthy than us are doing so. In the last decade alone, writes Benjamin Schneider in his Substack “Urban Condition,” Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Serbia, Poland, Greece, and Indonesia have inaugurated high-speed rail lines. “Most of Spain’s 2,500-mile network, the second-largest in the world,” he writes, “was built in the 21st century.” Vietnam just announced plans for a nearly 1,000-mile-long high-speed rail line. Meanwhile, Amtrak set ridership records in 2024, up a whopping 15% from 2023! So the demand is there.

Air Canada is bringing free wi-fi to its entire fleet starting next year, with the roll-out coming first to airplanes already wi-fi equipped and then the airline working to expand it to the rest of its craft. This means Air Canada will go from a situation where I’ve never been on a flight of theirs with wi-fi (including a long haul) to one where they leapfrog a giant like United which will still be charging for the service.

It feels like every year or so I see another piece asking if airships are about to make a comeback, but it is something to marvel at how indelible the Hindenburg disaster still is in the public consciousness.

I very much want to do this hacienda road trip in Central Mexico…

And I enjoy Barbara Corcoran explaining why she always flies coach.