THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 23
PHOTOGRAPH BY HEAMI LEE FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Lekka Burger
81 Warren St.
There has never been a better time to
eat a meatless hamburger. The current
surge of interest in plant-based diets has
sparked an arms race of sorts. Companies
such as Impossible Burger and Beyond
Meat are using cutting-edge technology
to make ground-beef facsimiles that
look, feel, and even smell eerily similar
to the real thing; you can find their prod-
ucts everywhere from small restaurants
to national fast-food chains and super-
markets. Meanwhile, in New York, a
number of creative chefs have put serious
effort into improving upon the arche-
type, using actual vegetables.
Since 2008, the chef Amanda Cohen
has been the force behind Dirt Candy,
the first vegetarian restaurant to hold
its own in New York’s fine-dining land-
scape. Cohen had never served a veggie
burger before Andrea Kerzner, a South
African philanthropist looking for ways
to fight climate change, cold-called her
to propose that they collaborate on a
restaurant built around one, but she was
game to try. Last November, they opened
Lekka Burger, in Tribeca.
Kerzner, a longtime vegan, has
said that she wanted the eponymous
burger—lekka is Afrikaans slang for
“awesome”—to taste like “something
made in a kitchen, not a lab.” What
Cohen achieved is a technical marvel:
a perfectly puck-shaped patty, made
primarily of portobello mushroom,
cannellini beans, and a hint of chili,
plus a secret binding agent that holds
everything together, even when topped
with a vegan cheese sauce (butter beans,
coconut oil). The charred exterior is crisp
and craggy. The interior has a pink hue
that recalls medium-rare ground chuck.
The flavor is deeply smoky but unmis-
takably vegetal.
It’s the best kitchen-made veggie
burger the city has seen since Brooks
Headley, a former pastry chef at Del
Posto, opened Superiority Burger, in
the East Village. Headley’s patty, which
contains roasted carrots, chickpeas, red
quinoa, and crushed walnuts, among
other ingredients, is much smaller and
squishier, its effect more wholesome and
retro, its following fervent. Yet, in “The
Superiority Burger Cookbook,” Headley
explains that the restaurant’s name is “a
bit of a red herring.” “Sure, the majority
of our business is selling vegetarian ham-
burgers,” he writes, “but you can cobble
together a very nice meal here and avoid
the burger altogether.”
The same cannot be said of Lekka,
which offers five iterations of its
burger—with globally themed toppings
such as papadum and curry-tamarind
ketchup, or guacamole and Hatch-
chili sauce—and three salads, only one
of which, the cauliflower Waldorf, I’d
consider ordering again. And this is the
main reason I find Lekka disappointing:
in this golden age of vegetable-centric
cooking, focussing on a meatless dish
crafted in the image of a meaty one
strikes me as increasingly misguided.
Lekka mimics Shake Shack, down
to the efficient counter service, the very
good crinkle-cut fries, and the shakes
(made with excellent oat-milk soft serve).
The cheerful, colorful branding feels slick
and corporate, millennial-targeted and
franchise-ready (Kerzner hopes to open
more locations in New York), with a Ms.
Pac-Man machine by the bathroom and
potted succulents affixed to tabletops.
There’s even a full bar.
But why uphold the very paradigm
you’re trying to overturn? A meal at
Lekka only left me with a craving for a
beef burger. I see much more potential
for fast-food revolution in “a very nice
meal” at Superiority Burger, where the
burger is, as Headley seems to acknowl-
edge, the least interesting thing on the
menu. Give me sandwiches stuffed with
stretchy sheets of tofu skin, also known
as yuba; salads of charred broccoli and
candied cashews or tart beets sprinkled
with sesame seeds and fried pretzels; a
scoop of startlingly refreshing mandarin
sorbet. A very nice meal at Superiority
Burger is a glimpse into how genuinely
sustaining a world with fewer burgers—
meatless or otherwise—could be. (Lekka
burgers, $9.95-$11.95.)
—Hannah Goldfield
