It breaks down something like this: You start with a visit to the Charlie’s Burgers website where you’re instantly met with an ominous looking grey door with the letters ‘CB’ scrawled across the front. All you’re able to do is enter your email address and wait for them to get back to you with a questionnaire where you’ll be quizzed on the preferences and curiosities of your adventurous palate.
If you’re lucky enough to be selected for one of these Toronto-based events, that’s when things get really get interesting.
They get back to you with the location, not of the dinner party itself, but rather of a nearby rendezvous point where you’ll—that’s right—receive further instructions.
You arrive at the designated street corner, approach a specified newspaper box and peer inside. There you find an envelope with your name on it. Inside are directions to the nearby location. You put the amount of the suggested donation for the night’s fine dining into the envelope and make your way there.
Intrigued? Wondering who could mastermind such an experience? Bitchin’ Kitchen tracks down the elusive Charlie Burgers – the man assigning you your gastronomic mission, should you choose to accept it – to shed a little light on his new form of culinary and dining innovation.
“The idea is quite simple,” explains Charlie, “A great chef puts together an ultra-creative menu; our wine director pairs it up with interesting and sought-after wines and the dinner is held in a unique space, outside a traditional restaurant setting. Each event is very different so the only constant is that the menu and the wines will knock your socks off.”
It’s that dedication to creativity in the kitchen and willingness to push food preparation as an art that’s helped Charlie’s Burgers grow in notoriety and find itself in the running for Food & Wine Magazines top 100 experiences in the world. No small feat. The key to success, Charlie claims, lies in the stripping down of traditional restaurant conventions; swapping out the tried-and-true for intrigue and inspiration. Ultimately, the focus on unique locations, the right guests and the best food & chefs is what helps Charlie’s Burgers continue to gain momentum.
The “non-traditional” locations are anything but ordinary. You might find the address matches an abandoned bakery where your dinner will be taking place. You might find yourself entering the doors of a pristine art gallery to discover a table for twenty set at its center. But wherever you end up, you can rest assured that from that point on, the emphasis of your night will be on top-notch food and drink.
“Like any other business, restaurants are driven by generating revenue. Chefs are typically bound by a specific menu, culinary style and set of food and labor costs as well as their clientele's tastes. Chefs need to design menus with recognizable and top-selling items. I wanted to remove these variables and get down to the pure creativity.”
The dining experience depends as much on those who eat the food as those who prepare it. “We base our attendance on a mixture of first come, first serve and randomly selected guests. It also helps if you were creative in answering our questionnaire. People who answer the questionnaires with fun stories or interesting details about themselves usually make for interesting dinner guests,” says Charlie.
Although Charlie’s Burgers recently had a story done on them about their 10-course dinner menu revolving around insects, Charlie stresses the goal of these feasts has nothing to do with shock value.
“The goal is 100% culinary innovation and the promotion of the culinary arts. Sometimes the introduction of new things or methods pushes the norms and boundaries. Our culinary vision changes with each and every chef and sommelier," he says. "We adhere and mold to his/her culinary inspiration for the menu they put together. Our vision is their vision. So far, it seems to work smashingly well every time…I put my trust in the chef to create the menu of their choice and I want our guests to trust them just as much.”
“All our guests have reviewed the menu ahead of time so everyone is fully aware of what will be served by our guest chef. Charlie’s Burgers is not about Fear Factor food, rather it is about pushing culinary boundaries by letting chefs create any menu they want.”
“The inspiration was to give a great chef a blank canvas to create any menu he/she wants. No limitations. The drive was not to fill a menu with best-selling items but rather challenge my diners and introduce things they may not usually order but end up loving after they’ve dined with me.”
While there’s been much speculation as to who the real face behind the Charlie Burgers persona is, his actual identity is something no one’s been able to positively lock down. Not for lack of trying, though. Reading through a few foodie blogs, people have made arguments for him being anyone from local sommelier Jamie Drummond, to celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey, to the Governator of California himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Self-described as someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously and who is, “Eccentric, passionate, innovative and always within six feet of a can of foie gras,” perhaps the most revealing piece of information about the elusive Charlie Burgers comes when we ask about Charlie’s perfect burger.
“The Spotted Pig burger, NYC. Every time I go to NY I must have that burger when I arrive and right before I leave. It has become a tradition. Every year there is debate that there are better burgers in NYC, I have kept an open mind and have tried the others, but I have yet to find any as enjoyable as the Spotted Pig Burger. It is still the burger for me. The Spotted Pig Burger is the ultimate Charlie Burger. In fact if the Spotted Pig had to rename it, I think the Charlie Burger would be a very fitting name.”
At its core, despite the distinction of being dubbed an “anti-restaurant” experience, Charlie’s Burgers seeks to represent the creative flair of North America’s culinary community, as well as the rest of the world. This “chefs without borders” concept blended carefully with a little cloak-and-dagger invites the connoisseur and the curious alike to sample dishes prepared by top chefs guided, for a change, purely by their imaginations, instead of by popular demand. This is at the core of what makes the Charlie’s Burgers experience truly an original.
“The entire CB team loves the restaurant industry in Toronto and abroad. I simply act as a tool to promote the industry – its great restaurants, phenomenal chefs, imaginative sommeliers and dedicated artisans. Without the great restaurant industry we have here in Toronto and the rest of Canada, there would never be a concept like Charlie Burger.”