Is The Father's Office Burger Any Good? | Father's Office Burger Copycat Recipe!

Today on Ballistic Burgers I'm going to be cooking up one of my all-time most requested burgers out of the LA area, the office burger from Father's Office. Let's get going. So Father's Office is the creation of Chef Singh Yoon. Opened up in 2000 in Santa Monica, California. Since then there are now a total of three locations. Again, Santa Monica, Culver City, and downtown LA. He added a burger to his menu. It's a gastropub in the year 2000 and that burger actually blew up. Several publications were naming it best burger in LA, best in the country. I think Yelp voted it best in the United States. Line's forever waiting for this burger and to this day, I mean it's 24 years later, it's still mentioned in LA's top burgers. Chef Yoon is very secretive about the burger but I've watched a lot of interviews with him and he said that he built it around his love for French onion soup. There's a compote on there. It's an onion bacon compote that he makes and he's very secretive about that. I know in one of the interviews he said that the onions are cooked for 12 hours. So I kind of wrapped my head around his thought and I was kind of, not that I'm a chef or anything, I'm not, but I was thinking what would I do if I really loved French onion soup and I wanted to build a burger around it? I would make French onion soup and then reduce it into a compote. And so that's what I made up my mind that I was going to do. But since it is in LA, it's like a little over two hour drive from here, I really wanted to make sure that before I jump into this recreation that I got to try the burger. So last week my wife and I went and I had the burger. Stick around to the very end of this video after I kind of review my creation. I'm also going to give you my thoughts on the actual office burger from father's office in LA. But it's an interesting burger. Like I said, it has that compote. They'll only cook it one way. You have no options. It's their way or the highway basically. But it's eight ounces of dry-aged beef with two cheeses, melted Gruyere and Maytag blue cheese. Then it's topped with that compote, arugula, and then the buns. And the buns are lightly toasted with garlic butter. And it's very interesting in that it's an oblong shaped burger. So the first thing you're going to have to do, because it's 12 hours of cooking this onion soup, is make the onion soup. And I based my compote off of a onion soup recipe. It's Julia Child's recipe. And I didn't make her recipe verbatim, but I was using it as a guide for ingredients. So I kicked it off with rendering out 20 ounces of bacon. Now there's no bacon in Julia Child's recipe, but there is in the office burger. I used an enamel cast iron pot for this. And once that bacon was rendered out, I removed the bacon, sat it aside, left all that rendered fat in there. And then I started caramelizing the onions. I wanted to brown the onions a bit. I used diced sweet onions. I'm not sure what Chef Yoon uses, but you want to develop some sweetness. He says he's not adding, you know, he's not making like a sugary jam. He's allowing the sugars from those caramelized onions to do all the talking. So I used 10 cups of diced sweet onions. And I actually had to kind of caramelize them or brown those onions batch by batch. So I was going like a little over three cups per batch until they were all browned. Once all those onions were browned, I deglazed the inside of that pot. I mixed up one cup of beef broth and one cup of white wine, used a little of that to deglaze it. Once it was deglazed, I threw those onions back in the pot, poured the rest of that white wine and beef broth in there, all that beautiful bacon, along with five additional cups of beef broth. Then I added three tablespoons of cognac, one half teaspoon of ground sage, one bay leaf, and a half teaspoon of sugar. That's part of Julia Child's recipes, and believe me, one half teaspoon amongst all that onion is not going to make that much of a difference. I put the lid on it. I had the oven preheated at 275 degrees, and I cooked that for 12 hours. Halfway through, I took a peek and I stirred it. It's amazing the way this tastes. I mean, it's just as a soup, it's really good, especially with all that bacon in there. So after it was done, what I did was I removed a portion of it and reduced it in a pan to where it was the consistency of a compote. And this is what I ended up with. You can see it's extremely deeply rich brown color, and it is good. Not too, too sweet. There is some sweetness there from those onions. More on the beefy, bacon-y, savory side. But anyway, now let's form that oblong burger. So I said before on this burger that patty is eight ounces, a half a pound of ground dry-aged chuck. I just happen to have some dry-aged chuck from Porter Road, and I ground it up last night. This is an eight ounce portion. In one of Chef Yoon's interviews, he said it's very difficult to get dry-aged beef at home. It's not. Again, I'll have a link down below if you want to check this out, but it's really not that expensive either to get, you know, dry-aged chuck. So I'm starting out with a circle, and I'm going to form it into that oblong shape. And you'll see the buns I'm using. This is for the size of the buns. And when I went there in person, I was really surprised at how small the buns were for this big, thick patty. You know, on TV, things look larger than they are, I think, including actors. They look a lot taller usually. All right. So I'm just going to kind of shape it into that kind of a football shape. There we are. I'll show you the buns that I'm using right here. You can see it's pretty much the same size as the bun, so I did a good job. Chef Yoon, I don't know what he's using. It's kind of, I guess, a French roll, but it's a soft crust. It's not crispy. And what I bought was... Now, I wanted a bakery roll. I didn't want to buy something that's, you know, in a package. So this is from my grocery store's bakery. They're selling these as bolillo rolls. We have some, you know, Mexican mercados around where I live. And it's a little bit... This is... The texture of this is more kaiser roll-ish, but they're really good rolls. And I think it's going to be a perfect match for this burger. So I'm going to season this with some kosher salt, some fresh ground pepper. Now we're ready to cook a burger. For this roll, I have some melted butter with fresh garlic in here. Just give it a little paint job here. So I'm using an infrared broiler here. At home, you could use a toaster oven or the broiler in your house. You don't need an infrared broiler. That's what they're using at the restaurant. So I have one of these little... They're for the outdoors, so I'm using it. I'm going to get a little toast on the bread here. What we really want to do is just kind of get the fragrance going on the garlic. That's it. So it's a very light toast. So they're grilling the burgers there at father's office. As far as the patty's concerned, they are cooking to order, but the preferred way they want it served is medium rare. A little bit more salt. A bit more pepper. Just a little turn here. All right. Now this is going to go onto our bun and on top of the patty. Putting that shredded Gruyere. This is freshly shredded Gruyere. This is the good stuff. Came from Switzerland and I grated this myself. So this isn't pre-grated cheese. Now we're going to add... This is that Maytag blue cheese. This is funky. One thing I found out when I bought this is that it is actually owned by the family. The appliance fame. It's Maytag Farms. They make cheese too. Cheese and washing machines. Who knew? Now from here, they use what's called a salamander, which is basically an infrared broiler in their kitchen. Again, I have this. It's a Schwenk. The company that actually invented infrared technology. But I have this in the backyard here. It's great for searing. But you can do this again in a toaster oven or in the broiler in your oven. You do not need to buy equipment like this to make this sandwich yourself. There we are. So the next thing is that compote. That bacon onion jam. This is all heated up. Now we're going to add arugula. If you're in like Great Britain, you guys call this rocket. It's kind of a peppery lettuce-y green, I guess you'd call it. We have a decent amount of this. Now they crown it. And there we are. The office burger from the father's office. Let's cut it in half. See how we did. Like I said, they serve theirs medium rare. I'm not really a medium rare guy. This was on the grill. I pulled it. It was probably about medium rare when I pulled it. It came up just from that infrared broiler. And I'm not going to cry if it's not medium rare. We'll see. Actually, that's perfect for me. That's a medium leaning very much towards medium rare. For this meat, this quality of meat and everything, I'm fine with this. I mean, just it is extremely juicy. Just look at that. Like I said, for me, if I'm going to have a burger more on the rare side, this is where I want it. So I'm happy with that. Let's give this a try. Cheers. It's a really good burger. I'm going to take some grief for this. But I'm actually going to say, I think my burger is better than the one I had at father's office. And let me explain. So again, we went there last week. It was over a two hour drive to get there. Very excited. I've seen so many reviews of this. So many people raving. Chefs raving about how awesome this burger is. So my expectations were way high. We got there. I mean, I'm saying things I don't need to say. Anyway, I had the burger at the gastropub. And I was just, I felt a little let down. And I'll tell you why. It's a very chef-y burger, obviously. You have no choice. You have to, if you order the burger, you're going to get it this way regardless. My wife, she doesn't like blue cheese. So she had something else. So let's think about this here. You have dry aged beef, which has a bit of a funk to it. Then you have gruyere that has a bit of a funk to it. Then this Maytag blue cheese, which has a lot of funk to it. I just felt that from a perspective of balance, it needed something else. And I think what kind of disappointed me was their compote, that onion bacon compote. It was just a little too savory. Because basically it's savory on top of savory on top of savory. There wasn't really any contrast. Mine, and I think it's the sweet onions. I don't think that the chef's using sweet onions. My compote's a little sweeter than, I can say this, than his. Or at least the burger I had in LA. And it's balancing this out better. So this is good. His is good. I don't think it's great. It's not as great as everybody is raving about. And maybe it's just me personally. But I just thought it was way, it was like umami on top of umami. I mean, umami, it enhances flavors. But he really didn't have any non-umami flavors for it to enhance. So it was just funky, funky, funky. And yeah, I felt a little let down by that burger. This, on the other hand, I don't think it really needs that blue cheese. I think with just the gruyere, you're good. It's, with all those those cheeses and then, you know, the seasoned patty. It's, and he seizes his with salt and pepper. It's very salty. But like I said, this is good. And the meat, this dry aged chuck is killer. So anyway, that's it in a nutshell. I'm extremely happy with this copycat. I think I nailed his vision. And it tastes very much like his. But the onions, I said, is just a little bit sweeter, which I think makes it better. That's my opinion. But I'm extremely happy with this. It's a lot of work doing this. You have to do, again, that onion compote. You need to do that at least one day in advance. I did mine two days in advance just to make sure that I had it down and did the reduction and everything. But it's not really that complicated. It's just a lot of time spent making this burger. But happy with everything. Happy with the bun selection. That, that dry aged, the dry aged chuck is perfect for a burger. This is good. Anyway, thank you for stopping by. Keep those suggestions coming in. Now, there's a couple copycats on this burger already out there. And there's not one that I think touches on the actual burger. In fact, the one video copycat that has 2.4 million views, they used grape jelly in their compote. So if you want to help me out, share this video. Let's try at least to come close. I'm never going to reach 2 million on a video, but we can try. Anyway, if you're not subscribed, hit that sub button, ring the notification bell, thumb it up if you like it. I hope you did. And I'll see you on the next video. Cheers.