Fat-cat burger

Boca Raton loves to play up its image of wealth and luxury. Here was a chance to hold up a mirror.

THAT $100 BURGER MAY BE TASTY, BUT IT'S ALSO TASTELESS
Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

Just in time for your Fourth of July barbecue: the $100 hamburger.

The Old Homestead Steak House in the Boca Raton Resort & Club put this baby on the menu to great fanfare last week.

Their 20-ounce softball-size burger is made from beef from three continents: corn-fed American prime; free-range cattle from the Argentine pampas, and Japanese Kobe from cattle that were fed soybeans and beer, bathed in sake and massaged by hand.

For the debut last Tuesday, "the coveted ingredients were flown in fresh," the restaurant's publicists said, "and delivered by armored car to a synchronized cavalcade of 10 uniformed chefs who ground, chopped and basted the beef" to be cooked up by a former executive chef for Donald Trump.

It was history in the making -- a milestone of hyperbole, if not gastronomy. Restaurant owners Greg and Marc Sherry called their creation "the Beluga caviar of sandwiches" and "the Romeo and Juliet of food."

I haven't tasted this two-handed ode to excess, which comes with a special chipotle sauce mixed with white truffles and champagne. Mere ketchup isn't allowed.

I asked, but my editor wouldn't expense it. "You can get a burger at The Green Owl for $4.95," he growled.



I did, however, stop by another Boca Raton eatery, the five-day-a-week soup kitchen called Boca Helping Hands. It's in a little rented church building a short drive from the famed resort.

About 75 people showed up on Monday for the free lunch, while the staff made up another 27 meals for home deliveries.

Monday is usually the day for a ground-beef casserole and for fresh shipments of fruits, salads and breads. It's amazing how much good food gets tossed because it's deemed too old for grocery shelves.

A $100 hamburger? Walter Palickas, the soup kitchen's manager, said he could buy 50 pounds of ground beef for that money.

"I could feed 120 people," Palickas said.

That would be people like Darryl and Stephanie Knight, and Stephanie's daughter Kimberly Belmar, a junior at Lake Worth High.

Darryl is on disability with a bad back, his wife said. Stephanie works intermittently. They were eating at the soup kitchen and bringing desserts home because they couldn't make their food stamps -- $168 worth -- stretch across the whole month.

"Sometimes we're out of food," she told me. Then, joking: "My husband eats a lot."

Increasingly, Boca Helping Hands, an interfaith charity, is serving the working poor, says executive director Joanne Szaja. "A lot of it is the rising gas prices," Szaja said. "That comes right off the top, right out of the food budget."

We live in a region of plenty that offers the amusement of a $100 hamburger. At the same time, 800,000 people in South Florida live below the poverty line, according to organizations that track hunger.

Last year, 23,000 people in Palm Beach County sought emergency food provided, in part, by the Daily Bread Food Bank, a clearinghouse for donations. That's in addition to another 30,000 people in Broward and 64,000 in Miami-Dade.

"It's a huge problem," says Judith Gatti,executive director of Daily Bread, based in Miami.

Some 800 nonprofits are running programs to combat hunger in South Florida. They're supported by thousands of donors -- including many from the restaurant industry, Gatti said.

Despite the generous effort, the need keeps growing. In recent years, the ranks of those seeking emergency food aid in America are increasing nearly 1 percent a year, she said.

The $100 hamburger?

"We could provide 600 meals for that," said Gatti. The economy is achieved by collecting and redistributing discarded and donated food, millions of pounds worth a year.

One hundred dollars.

It can buy three meals a day for a child for 200 days.

Or one ritzy burger.