NYC Chicken & Burgers: Cookout Grill Disappoints

November 17, 2008

THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED

Since moving from the Upper West Side to the East Village, I haven’t found any chicken as good as Chirping Chicken on 77th Street & Amsterdam Avenue. Cookout Grill, which opened on 13th Street & 1st Avenue in October, has a wood fired rotisserie, an open flame grill and a sign advertising an 100 percent beef burger. How bad could it be? Well I should have known from the sleek and flashy interior that Cookout Grill was trying too hard in all the wrong places. Read on the find out exactly what I mean…

$17 Worth of food and the hand cut fries were the best part.

A sleek interior can’t mask misguided grub.

When It Comes To Charbroiled Chicken, More is Less

Look at that beautiful chicken being cooked over an open wood-fired flame. So much promise. So much potential. The name Cookout Grill implies simple food prepared cookout style. When it comes to the chicken, they’ve got the right idea with the cooking, it’s just the preparation where they took a wrong turn.

Whereas Chirping Chicken’s great for its simplicity, its charbroiled birds are prepared with nothing more than chicken fat, garlic and salt, Cookout Grill gets a little trigger happy. They employ a spice rub containing garlic, oregano, rosemary, a special salt, pepper, prunes (for color), and most offensively, Indian yellow curry powder. The chicken marinates in this concoction for 2 days before being roasted over burning wood. I went with the 1/4 dark meat chicken with corn bread and sauce ($5.50).

The first bite was surprising but not in a good way. I detected the unwelcome yellow curry almost immediately. It didn’t grow on me as I continued eating and I felt duped. Indian curry is not a flavor your sneak into a chicken rub. I say sneak because it’s a dominant flavor; not oppressively so, but enough to be the main flavor of each bite. If I wanted curry, I’d go for Indian food.

The chicken was tender, fatty and moist, what you’d expect from dark meat. The “sauce” contained chopped carrot, red onion, tomato and cucumber in a light vinegar dressing. It didn’t add much but the room temperature cornbread was light and sweet. Unfortunately, the curry was an issue for me. I came for the flavors of a cookout, something the burger delivered but the chicken missed…

Here’s the Beef But Where’s the Love?

I’ll give Cookout Grill credit for two things when it comes to their burger: One, at a half pound, it’s a big burger. Two, it’s cooked over an open flame. That’s where the love ends from NYC Food Guy and apparently that’s where it ends at Cookout Grill too.

The sign out front of the restaurant advertises “never frozen meat.” Well if that’s the case, let us enjoy the use of fresh beef instead of smushing the life out of the burger, leaving a little pink and no juice for my medium rare. My 1/2 pound cheeseburger ($7.99 + $3.00 for lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, cole slaw, a side of your choice and a soda) looked great upon first slice. It was pretty much all downhill from there. American cheese was low quality and the bun was standard cafeteria fare, making the standalone cheeseburger very unworthy of its $7.99 price tag.

It seems like their was no attention to grill work. The burger was flattened and charred around the edges. Although it embodied the cookout flavor, it lacked any real beefiness. Burger purists will argue that I can expect no less with the amount of ketchup I put on. Ordinarily I wouldn’t acknowledge their statement because Heinz ketchup is heaven in a bottle. Unfortunately at Cookout Grill, we were dealing with an impostor…

Ketchup Blasphemy

I know Heinz ketchup when I taste it and this was no Heinz. Despite the appearance of Heinz bottles on every table at Cookout Grill, there was an impostor in our company and its name was Hunt’s. I should have known from the start when I spied packets of Hunt’s ketchup behind the counter. But the gig was up as soon as fry struck ketchup. This brand of treachery is reason enough for me to never return to Cookout Grill.

A Cookout Up In Smoke

If you’re going to bill yourself as Cookout Grill, keep it simple and keep it affordable. The crispy, hand-cut fries were the only saving grace for the $11 burger platter. As for the chicken, I admire the initiative to try something new in regard to the curry spice mix, but it just didn’t work. It’s peculiar to me that so much effort would be put into the chicken but so little into the burger. A better bun, higher quality cheese and grill regulation could put this burger near the top of the East Village food chain. Cookout Grill is exerting effort in all the wrong places; pretentious chicken and underwhelming burgers can’t be masked by a flashy atmosphere.