A Beefy Lament

Like most American kids, I grew up liking McDonald’s. But not its burgers. I didn’t become a burger lover 'till my twenties when I realized there was a happy medium between McDonald’s and the blood-rare burgers my mom and dad tucked into.

And today, there’s a burger renaissance going on across America. Foodies and serious chefs alike are deep into hot, meaty action. New York and LA are flooding with burger-restaurant concepts. It is a renaissance that has skipped our frigid wasteland entirely.

I just finished editing our annual Critic’s Picks feature for our Best Restaurants issue (March). One of Andrew Zimmern’s picks is Convention Grill in St. Louis Park (“The perfect family burger joint,” he called it).

The rugrats and I had just been to the dentist in Linden Hills, so I decided to take Zimmy’s advice. And I was reminded why I hadn’t been to Convention Grill in two years.

I’m here to officially proclaim the Twin Cities as America’s Worst Burger Towns, and Convention Grill as among the prime (choice?) offenders.

Strike 1: No char (grill not hot enough)
Strike 2: Cheese layered over lukewarm toppings
Strike 3: Cheese thus not melted
Strike 4: Bun spongy, insufficiently toasted
Strike 5: Meat well-done (that would be overcooked)
Strike 6: Paltry, beefy flavor

How can a place so perfectly set up to deliver a great burger turn out such a crap one? I think it’s your fault.

Who me? you ask. Yeah, you.

As I rearranged my burger in a vain attempt to melt the cheese, a beefy fellow discussing Weight Watchers points ogled it in all its gray-and-orange glory. “These are the best burgers in the Twin Cities,” he lustily told his companion. “They win all the awards.” He then proceeded to order his—dramatic pause—well-done.

I’m willing to make allowances for taste, but well-done burgers are tasteless. That’s why so many of you now dip your burgers (like the fries) in the ketchup: Because there’s no taste in the burger. Why do so many Minnesotans, in the heart of the nation’s corn belt and prime meat-eating territory, order meat well-done? (All the fat and calories and antibiotics without any of the flavor. Sounds like a marketing campaign.)

Restaurants are to blame as well—between liability concerns over E. coli and indifferent cooks, a lot of places can’t make a burger as ordered. I cook them at home about five times a year and can do it by touch. Why can’t they at Convention Grill? Because nobody demands it, that’s why.

I’ve had Vincent’s signature short rib, etc. burger. It came well-done, jets of hot short rib fat shooting out of a pocket in the meat. Matt’s Juicy Lucy? Second-degree burns and granular dry meat that would shame a school cafeteria.

Is there anyone out there who orders a burger less than medium-well anymore? Is there any joint out there who can cook one that way besides a local steak house?

Share your tips and horror stories with me. If enough of us care, perhaps we can start a movement to shame them into cooking burgers right.

Bridge and Tunnel

Is yesterday’s announcement from the National Transportation Safety Board preliminarily blaming a design flaw in the I-35W bridge a blame-game changer? Yes and no. Clearly it takes the wind out of the sails of the “neglect” constituency.

That doesn’t mean neglect wasn’t a contributing factor, which seems to be Nick Coleman’s point, but it’s clearly a negative for those DFLers hoping to use the legislative session that begins next month to hammer Pawlenty's starvation budgets and guilt the misers into more sensible transportation spending.

I’m not receptive to the view that the NTSB’s announcement was politically motivated. This is a federal agency previously known to be immune to politics. (Admittedly, others also once immune, such as NASA, have been corrupted by the Bush administration.) The NTSB typically issues mid-investigation updates in major disaster cases, so this week’s was not an outlier. I think we need to give the NTSB the benefit of the doubt, for now.

That noted, the 35W bridge didn’t collapse in 1969. It stood for forty years with said design flaw. That’s a long time. Clearly the ever-greater loads the bridge received and its ongoing deterioration had to be contributory factors. We design everything from bridges to airplanes with more safety and redundancy today.

“Fracture critical” bridges are not wise structures to test the limits of age and use. We are doing so because we have been starving transportation funding in this state since the Carlson administration. It remains foolhardy to believe last August’s bridge collapse was based merely on a design flaw—but with no broad-based meaning and implications.

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Met Council chairman Peter Bell, one of the few pleasant surprises of the Pawlenty era, laid down a gauntlet this week in a Strib op-ed column. The Central Corridor LRT line is massively over budget. Unless $300 million in costs are shaved, the feds won’t pay for half, meaning it won’t get built.

There are three major budget busters in the current plan: extra stations along University Ave., building the line through all of downtown St. Paul to little-used Union Station, and a subway tunnel under Washington Ave. at the University of Minnesota.

Govenor Pawlenty only budgeted half the necessary state bonding needed to get the feds to pony up, noting in his State of the State address this week that he would look kindly on doubling down only if the various interest groups could make the necessary compromises to bring the costs down.

The Central Corridor is going to carry a lot more “local” (non end-to-end) traffic than the Hiawatha Line. More stations mean more riders. We need to find a way to keep walking distances to University Ave. stations to no more than a third of a mile.

The Union Station gambit is a good idea, especially if it becomes St. Paul’s transit hub and the region’s new Amtrak terminus—but that’s not close to happening. So it may need to become a future extension unless the city and Ramsey County alone find a way to pay for it.

But the University subway is an unnecessary boondoggle, and it is ridiculous that the University remains so fixated on it.

LRT to campus has the potential to massively reduce auto traffic and congestion in Stadium Village. The idea that there is some danger to students and pedestrians from relatively slow-moving transit vehicles in what is already a traffic speedway is asinine. Moving the line over the new I-35W bridge through Dinkytown makes no sense as it’s not the part of campus that commuter students need access to.

Simply put, the University is jeopardizing the future of a regionally integral transit venture by insisting on a feature that is not just costly but probably unwise. It’s predicated on un-sound and intellectually unsupported reasoning—scary coming from the realm of academia. Turning this subway into a make-or-break issue has the potential to seriously damage the U’s credibility among the liberal intelligentsia and urban DFL caucus that is its most valued constituency.

It’s time for the U to get on the train or get out of the way.

My Compact: Denial Is Not Virtue

We are a nation of fanatics. How can one conclude anything else? We have to turn everything into a religion. Osama would be proud.

Consider the acolytes of the Compact, an anti-materialist venture that requires its adherents to buy nothing new for a year. (Does Internet porn count? A friend was wondering.)

One of the Compacters the Strib quoted yesterday said the $1 bins at Target she once loved now “repulsed” her. That bin filled my kids’ stockings last month I’d have her know. And she’s still buying diapers (our kids used cloth; think of the water we wasted).

It takes goofy ventures such as the Compact (or this silly young family in NYC that is going without petroleum or its offshoots for a year—no deodorant) to illustrate why liberals seem so feckless to the rest of the country.

I mean, isn’t it enough to recycle, take public transit now and then, trade in your SUV, compost, recycle your feces into handy tools and implements . . .? Sorry, got carried away—I have liberal leanings.

And I’m in the media, who are fellow travelers. The press, by and large, hates consumerism—though it’s what pays its bills. The Strib is going to follow these Compactors for a year, mind you. So it can revel in their self-denial and sense of righteousness. So it can feel righteous, too!

Throughout the years, I’ve tried to divine the contempt that so many of my peers in the local media feel for the magazine I work for. We don’t hurt anyone, we don’t take cheap shots, tear anything down. We build up, we tell stories, we recommend.

I used to think it was because earnest journalists believed that the only form of professional legitimacy was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. (Which we don’t do all that much of here.) But most journalists aren’t that stupid.

What most of them are, though, is addled with contempt for those who don’t share their values. And journalists are offended by the consumerism that lifestyle magazines are rooted in. There’s a kind of proud asceticism in writers and academics though I generally regard it as snobbery rooted in false virtue.

I wish I could go to the other side, but they’re worse albeit less smug. I mean, I’m pissed off that all these greedy bastards in banking and investing created this lending bubble that has got our economy in the tank. Canada’s economy is fine, you’ll note. So is Australia’s. Greed isn’t validated in those societies, and there are more checks and limits on it. And I have no sympathy for the rubes who took out mortgages they didn’t understand either. Own up to your own greed, I say.

There is something about people preoccupied with consumerism to the exclusion of everything else that is chilling. Perhaps it’s the abdication of a sense of responsibility for anything but yourself that nags at me. Whatever. It’s just a different kind of fanaticism. I mean, would it hurt you to read a paper or think about something besides when the next issue of Lucky arrives?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a seat in business class, a 42-inch plasma TV, a trip to New Zealand, an iPhone, and some granite countertops that I have my eyes on. But I am not so distracted by all of it that I’m paying no attention to the world around me.

There is more to life than gratifying yourself and earning more money so you can gratify some more. But why is it that so many of the people who understand that are not people you’d want to have a beer with?

Off-Target?

I am not much of an investor, but I have a massive stake in Target Corp., Minnesota’s most prominent Fortune 100 company. My wife works there as a real estate attorney, her 401K match is paid in Target stock, and she gets market-priced stock options most years. TGT stock showed some flashes last year but is back in the dumper, trading for less than $50 (as of January 2) and as close to its post-9/11, tech-bubble lows than this decade’s highs.

If that sounds fishy to you, it does to me, too. Target is universally regarded as an innovative, well-run retailer. It’s growing, profitable, and always hits its numbers except in times of economic turmoil. Target stock should be a lot higher.

A guy named William Ackman agrees with me. He’s an “activist investor” and multi-billion dollar hedge fund impresario who has amassed 10 percent of Target’s shares. He has called Target the best-run retailer in America and thinks the stock should be trading at approximately $120. The guy is no fool.

And he obviously wants to make some money on his investment. He is calling on Target to sell its credit card operations (frequently the most profitable aspect of the company’s business—the company is studying it), buy back shares (already happening), and just concluded Target needs to “unlock the value” in its $42 billion in real estate holdings. It’s a fair assumption that means sell.

A lot of folks at Target HQ are uneasy about Ackman’s goals, I suspect. Does it really make sense for the company to sell its most profitable operations and its real estate in a down market during a near recession? And what then? If this respected management team believed the key to the company’s future was generating all this cash, wouldn’t they have done so?

Trust me, I would love to see Target stock at $120. It would not make us rich, but I’d have a fighting chance to put my kids through college without saddling one of us with massive amounts of debt. But William Ackman does not have Target’s long-term interests at heart. He has his own short-term interests and will, one way or another, walk away from the red bull’s-eye in a matter of months.

Problem is, under our economic system, a public company’s primary obligation (under law and economic tradition) is to its stockholders, who incur the most risk of all the company’s stakeholders (employees, creditors, lenders, etc.).

If the market likes Ackman’s strategy and Target refuses to play ball, it will punish Target’s stock. The company will come under pressure, management wisdom may be questioned by its board, a takeover gambit could even ensue—Target might become a division of GE, and its headquarters would move to NYC.

None of that would be great news for Target, my finances, my wife’s continued employment, or the Twin Cities (via the massive number of jobs and economic activity Target generates here). But long-term thinking rarely plays in our gamed, short-term driven markets.

It’s now up to Target, if it isn’t going to monetize all its assets, to convince Wall Street, institutional investors (such as pension funds), and market pundits (such as Jim Cramer), that there’s comparable upside in thinking long-term and trusting management.

Odds are, there will be some sort of compromise to get Ackman out of Target’s hair—management will do some things they’d rather not do, and Target will go back to business. But make no mistake—guys like Ackman operate with a scorched-earth strategy. The mess he can potentially create at Target could permanently damage or even lead to the loss of the company.

He may be here to unlock value, but the values he represents are more likely to unlock chaos.