Health Food With Some Meat to It
Health foodies have a tedious habit of scattering around words like “scrumptious” to describe gruesome organic sludge. When they’re not just kidding themselves, they’re usually telling a white lie for the cause of health food. But here’s the bitter truth: If they can’t make their food taste good, their cause is doomed in this quick-thrill fast-food world of ours.
Now, take this hamburger. A tall, fresh bun with tomatoes, onions, lettuce and a beef patty--not thick, but not formed in one of those cookie-cutter patty shapers either. It has a rich flavor at the Wendy’s end of the beef spectrum, meaning there’s a clean, pleasant, liver-like taste in the background.
In short, it’s something you’d eat for pleasure. But astonishingly, this is a health-food hamburger; it has only 10 grams of fat (the usual burger runs 30 to 45 grams). When you’ve finished it, it’s as if you’ve had a satisfying hamburger but, in the classic health-foodie phrase, you don’t feel heavy and greasy.
Topz, the fast-food palace that sells this amazing burger, isn’t revealing its secret, though it speaks of recipes created by top chefs whose names can’t be revealed. My bet would be that a lot of it is simply freshness: a fresh, bready bun and freshly ground meat that hasn’t been handled too much. Another part is probably just not overreaching in the usual health-foodie manner (“Gee, if it still tastes good at 10 grams, why not take it down to 1 gram?”).
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Topz is located where you might expect, next to a Noah’s Bagels and a Jamba Juice in a Sherman Oaks mall (a West Hollywood branch will open soon). Topz is a place of bright red tabletops and, for some reason, vaguely Cubist depictions of burgers and burger chefs. The soundtrack is “USDA prime rock ‘n’ roll,” which seems to involve a lot of early Dylan.
Besides the hamburger, the place also sells some non-beef burgers, all of which, surprisingly, are faintly higher in either fat or calories. They include a good, juicy turkey burger (12 grams of fat and 420 calories; the hamburger is 440) and a pleasant chicken filet, which is not breaded in the fatty fast-food manner, so it’s pretty low (11 grams, 430 calories). Even the vegetable burger (10 grams of fat) has a few more calories (it’s 480) than the hamburger.
There’s also a good, relatively low-fat (25 grams) hot dog and a garlicky, very low (7 grams) chicken dog, which is the one thing here that does leave me feeling deprived in the diet-food way. You can get any of these sandwiches topped with low-calorie cheese, adding 3 grams of fat, and if you’re not counting calories at all, you can get chili (also available by itself), a second patty or even thick-cut bacon on your burger.
The French fries are hard to distinguish from the usual fries except for having only half the fat. The air-roasted “aero” fries have a hair less fat still, and taste a hair less like ordinary fries. There’s a “dipping sauce bar” for your burgers and fries, which includes Dijon mustard, “deli” mustard (the usual ballpark-type), mayo, very garlicky garlic mayo, pretty good barbecue sauce, a tamarind-heavy steak sauce and decent ranch and blue cheese dressings.
While the fries and most of the sandwiches are good by any standard, the salads--a chopped salad a bit short on the meat (turkey and salami) and a low-fat Caesar with a quite sharp dressing--only look good by comparison with other fast-food salads. Lettuce always tastes watery and sad in plastic cartons.
In lieu of milkshakes, there are fruit smoothies made with twice as much fruit as usual. The wild berry (strawberry, blueberry, banana and orange juice) is quite good, and so is one made of mango, passion fruit and coconut, though the coconut makes it a little gritty. The strawberry smoothie is a bit insipid. There’s a chocolate smoothie-shake that’s like a semi-frozen chocolate milk drink.
Topz also has a “soda bar” where you can mix tastes of the usual soft drinks and also doctor them with lime, cherry, vanilla or chocolate syrups. I followed one of the recommendations: 7-Up, lemonade, lime syrup and cherry syrup. Not bad.
Not bad at all. Altogether, Topz produces what might seem impossible: tasty, healthful fast food with a sense of fun.
BE THERE
Topz, La Reina Fashion Plaza, 14622 Ventura Blvd., No. 103, Sherman Oaks. (818) 788-8777; fax 788-1127. Open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday. No alcohol. Validated parking. MasterCard and Visa. Takeout. Hot dogs and burgers, $2.95 to $4.50; fries, $1.50; salads, $4.25; drinks, $1.25 to $2.95.
What to Get: hamburger, turkey burger, Topz dog, French fries, wild berry smoothie.