corner bistro

To those in search of an excellent new york city cheeseburger: may I recommend to you the Corner Bistro, happily located a mere two blocks from my place of abode (not that this proximity affects in any way the taste of said burger).

Vegetarians, lovers of healthifulnessity, deniers of hedonism: avert your fair untainted eyes.

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Meandering the serpentine streets of the west village, your first hint of grilled-bovine salvation is a concise neon appellation: "Corner Bistro", hold the serifs. Once inside, this sans frills style saturates the scene. A lazy haze of smoke once permeated the very soul of this cozy joint -- haze illegal now, its ghost remains in the nostalgic distance which, in your mind alone, separates your suddenly-anachronistic chic from the grimy aged authenticity of the regulars around you. The bar's cash register, a metalic curve of plastic mushroom buttons, is easily a century old if a day. A shaded flourescent bulb dimly illuminates a ten-line "menu" on the wall, consisting primarily of four varieties of burger. The missing 'i' in "chiliburger" imparts a lacunal singularity of character. An impressively laconic waitstaff waves your thankfully small party down a narrow coat-racked hall, adorned most curiously by a row of Heinz ketchup bottles -- each, label facing out, standing at attention, patiently awaiting its ephemeral tabletop role.

Be seated, or rather scrunched, at your table, and choose your fare; a 'bistro' means baconcheeseburger, or hold the pork, or the cheese or both or add some chili. Curiously baconic fries? Grilled cheese? A drink or two or so away, and you may wonder for a moment if that last fleeting gesticulation of your server was acknowledgement of an order soon fulfilled or was it just your hope assigning undue meaning to a twitch as they flurried away, order unheeded. But here! Yes, they heard! Half a pound of freshly-grilled, juice-imbued, cheese-melting, tomato-strewn, barely-bun-encompassed, beautiful beef sirloin sits steaming snuggly under your overwhelmed olfactory-orifacing salivation-inducing proboscis dinostrilonimus (don't worry I completely made up that last word). Now here we find a burger which, viewed in any cross section of significance, is still beef by vast majority: in volume, density, height, diameter, and sheer incorrigible flavorocity. Every bite produces from its opposite edge another egress of warm oily beef-nectar, which in turn deposits itself, filtered lingeringly along your fingertips, into a congealing puddle of wisely ignored goop atop your paper plate.

Upon completion of this iniquitous consumption, it will eventually occur to you that you must now open your eyes, pay the bill, and peacefully resume your normally scheduled life.