Parisburgers: Finding the Great American Meal in France

My wife and I have long considered the hamburgers at the Coffee Parisien to be the finest available, not fancy but consistently great, andthey’ve got the Americana theme nailed, right down to theplace mats listing all the U.S. presidents. But Coffee Parisien wasonly #3 on Figaro list, so we decided to eat around.
The burger that won the Figaroscope’s contest is served at Scoop , near the Palais Royale, a narrow place with a lunch counterdownstairs and a cozy lounge with tables upstairs. It looked morelike an ice-cream parlor, and indeed, they advertise homemade icecream. More on that later.
There are just a handful of burger options, all variations on theClassic: 200 grams of meat, or more to my understanding, almost ahalf pound; sauteed onions, artisan buns from a nearby bakery. Youcan add cheddar cheese, bacon, or go for the Scoop burger, which istopped with a fried egg. They came with roasted potatoes with freshrosemary sprigs, and the beer choices were few, but smart: Sagresof Portugal and Beck’s of Germany.
The burgers were extremely good. The ground beef was lean andtasted like a good steak, the onions were tangy and the bread wasthick like an Italian roll, easily able to withstand the weight.Having never thought of eggs and burgers, I decided to try theScoop speciality, but I confess the egg didn’t seem to addanything flavor-wise, and made the burger even messier to eat.
The individual elements of the Scoop burger are best in class, buteven their basic burger is nigh impossible to bite into. So youswitch to silverware, and inevitably the full burger experiencefalls apart: with each bite you get meat and egg, or bun withonions, or onions and meat — all sorts of combinations, butnever all the flavors at once.
It was even more of a problem when we tried Floor’s — number 4 on Figaro’s list — and just a fewblocks from our apartment. It’s housed in a former printingshop in a gritty neighborhood near the Chateau Rouge metro stop.It’s three floors of dining space are reached by a windingstaircase in the front of the building and are visible behind hugeplate-glass windows as you climb.
Though the decor is simple American diner, the burgers definitelyhave higher aspirations. First of all, you can order duckburgers,fishburgers and chickenburgers, or stick with the classic. Theclassic is ground to order and mixed with onions before it hit thegrill. The buns are big and squishy, and they have all sorts ofhigh-quality cheese and garnish choices, up to and including foiegras. I went for the duck burger, topped with grilled mushrooms;pretty darn good. But my mother-in-law, who was in town helping usfigure out how to raise a child, ordered the double hamburger. Itwas obscene. I can’t see any way to justify a hamburgerthat’s a tall as a glass of beer.
The sides were homemade and excellent, with potato salad, jacketpotatoes and classic fries, or onion rings — they were mychoice, and though I thought they were a little heavy on thebatter, you don’t find fresh onion rings in Paris every day.They’re part of the price of the burger (the classic startsaround 13 euros), and you also get a choice of small salads,ranging from chinese noodles to a handful of greens.
The draft beer selection stuck to the basics, Kronenbourg 1664 etal, and although the deserts sounded great (cheesecake, browniesand, bizarrely, blueberry pancakes) we were too full to give them atry. We did have the fresh guacamole and chips for an appetizer,they were top-notch.
But you know what? After our fancy burger-eating adventures, weended up thinking the Coffee Parisien was still our favorite: Youcan eat their burgers with your hands.
But we will be going back to Scoop soon — for the desserts, which werereally outstanding. They make all sorts of ice cream floats(Catherine got vanilla with an espresso poured over it, reallynice), and I had a chocolate brownie