Excess, broiled to perfection, on a bun

The price on the menu said $50. For a hamburger.

If there weren’t two crisp twenties under the bun, I couldn’t imagine what would make this worth it. But if you live long enough in a city where a first-grader’s birthday party can cost $3,000, you must remain sanguine in the face of absurdity.

I had started on a Saturday night with a $41 burger. By Sunday night, two miles on the treadmill later, I was at another restaurant uptown, face to face with a $50, 4-inch-tall tower of beef and bun, 2 inches higher than my black French pumps. This was not the launch of my Atkins diet. Rather, I had resigned myself to covering a competition between restaurateurs over who could reinvent the great American hamburger and charge the most for it.

Even though the bubble has burst and the country is facing an international crisis, New York City is fully engaged in a war over turning a low-rent food into something ineluctable.

This all heated up shortly after New Year’s.

For the first time, one of the oldest steakhouses in New York added a hamburger to its menu. Located in the meatpacking district since 1868, the Old Homestead offered 20 ounces of beer-fed Kobe beef on a bun for $41.

A few days later at DB Bistro Moderne, a top-rated French chef with a yen for publicity raised the stakes. Daniel Boulud began shaving $350-per-pound black truffles onto his regular DB Burger, raising the price from $29 to $50. This offering was good only for the four short months of the truffle season.

The $29 burger, which Boulud had debuted at the opening of his third restaurant in July 2001, is a patty of ground sirloin and chuck stuffed with foie gras and braised boned short ribs and topped with horseradish mayonnaise and bits of lettuce on a Parmesan bun.

Unsurprisingly, the New York Post got into the act, ginning up the competition with headlines like “Truffle-Burger Is $50 King.” By the next weekend, Larry King and David Letterman were said to be vying to get the two chefs together on camera. Meanwhile, Boulud was making cracks about how Kobe beef should be sliced, not ground, and Old Homestead owner Marc Sherry was accusing the Frenchman of stooping to using a publicist to hawk his burger.

As for the outsized prices, both men were clueless.

“OK, we’re going to war, but we’re not in a depression yet,” Boulud said.

“Everyone has $41,” Sherry said. “Or everyone can raise $41.” After all, he bragged, he sold 200 burgers the first day, 140 of them takeout orders from the nearby financial district. So much for the bear market.

In fact, the food service industry, the second largest in New York (after finance), is in the dumps here; even luxury restaurants are hurting. It did not bode well that the press began reporting last summer that people wanted less fancy and more homey food.

A counteroffensive with designer burgers was a fair response, insists Adriane Daguin, who supplies white-tablecloth restaurants with specialty foods like truffles and game. “It’s very clever of Daniel, Mr. Four Star Chef, to get himself on TV talking about this fancy burger dish,” she said. “It’s no time to sell sweetbreads with prunes.”

Well, this PR ploy certainly got my attention. I put aside my prejudices against fixing what’s not broken and invited my husband, my favorite New Yorker, to join me for dinner.

His first question was to be expected from a guy whose after-work comfort food is not a martini but a chocolate egg cream and a slice of toast with a thin layer of peanut butter: “Can I put ketchup on a $50 hamburger?”

It turns out you really don’t want to. The Old Homestead’s hunk of Kobe beef -- this cow got a massage every day -- had plenty of seasoning and enough salt to make me regret ordering red wine instead of a cold beer.

But the next night, the waiter at DB Bistro Moderne steered us to an unfiltered Spanish wine he said would go “really beautifully with the burger.” This time we split one, halved for us in the kitchen. As I examined my $24.50 portion, I wondered how Boulud had come up with the price.

Apparently, he considered charging $55 as a tribute to the restaurant’s address at 55 W. 44th St.

So why not $44?

“We’re adding $15 worth of truffles to a $29 burger,” said Guy Heksch, DB’s manager. “We needed to make some profit.” After a few bites, I realized I wasn’t eating a hamburger but the illusion of one. After all, when does a burger stop being a burger and become something else? I was confronting another tale of wretched New York excess, another bit of creative genius applied to pointless things.

A hamburger is one of the sublime pleasures of life and one that is universally available. Anybody can have a spirited debate about pan-fried versus flame-broiled. Everybody is an expert. But not everything lends itself to culinary gentrification. Some things cannot be improved, and a simple burger, a plate of fries and a cup of coffee with the right friend is one of them.

But at the end of the day, that Taj Mahal burger ... I’m still dreaming of it.