Yes and no. I mean yes, there’s definitely an element of “class consciousness” going on - burgers, like couscous or döners or fish 'n chips are sort of in a “cheap, filling, can be very good but probably don’t want to know where the ingredients come from” niche in my head so paying a lot for that except made without any trace of cat meat feels weird. I don’t even mind the cat meat ! And the “gourmet” burgers with foie gras, truffles, lobster and whatnot are just as much of a “class consciousness” item, as in “it’s what working class people think is posh” when *real *gourmet food concerns itself with vastly different aspects of food than the silly “that costs a mint, put some in too”.
(for reference, that 19€ burger I mentioned above had none of that BS in it. It was just a regular bacon cheeseburger but made with top of the shelf ingredients - crunchy fresh salad & tomatoes, 3 different types of melty French cheeses, freshly made tomato *purée *instead of Heinz, that kind of thing)
Beyond that, it’s also that a burger sort of piles everything it’s made of pêle mêle in a heap for you to shovel it all together into your mouth, so it’s more difficult to really appreciate or single out individual flavours or textures the way “real” gourmet dishes allow you to. Also ground meat patties sort of defeat most everything that’s great about good meat, so there is that as well :o
Worse than that : it was prison food. As in “uneatable garbage you make prisoners of war eat because no one else will” - there have been prison riots aboard US and British prison barges just because the prisoners refused to eat any more.
to me, it’s just that if I’m going to eat an expensive cut of beef, the last thing I’m going to want to do to it is grind it up and make it a burger. the couple of times I’ve had slices of Wagyu-style steak, the main thing which stood out to me was the unctuousness of the sheer amount of fat in it. Flavor? Tasted like beef and beef fat. so I’m fine with a burger made with cheaper cuts (often more flavorful anyway) and fat mixed in.
Ridiculous. I had a kobe beef burger at Abbey Burger in Baltimore. It was around $15-20. I have a hard time imagining a better tasting burger than that.
It’s all about the quality of meat and the correct cooking. Anything else is just a waste of money. Having said that, I will add that I’ve had some very good burgers in places where you would least expect to get one simply because those two criteria had been met.
I’ve had a special freshly hunted elk-burger in Montana that was around $30. It was damn tasty, and a better food experience than some expensive fine dining I’ve done.
FTR, neither “Wagyu” nor “Kobe” are AOCs (not sure what the non-EU reg for that is, if any - basically it means you only get to call your shit X if it comes from the X region and produced according to the X method), so for all intents and purposes what you* had was “just, yanno, beef. Except with more dollars”.
I’m straying from burgers, but that describes an extremely good chicken sandwich I had at a restaurant that’s sadly now closed. IIRC the owner was a highly trained chef, but chose to not go the “fine dining” route but instead opened a more casual, diner style restaurant that simply served very high quality versions of everyday foods (at least on the lunch menu; I think he did have some more “creative” entrees on the dinner menu).
But back to the sandwich. The basic ingredients sound like an ordinary grilled filet of chicken breast sandwich. But the chef had a smoker out behind the restaurant in which he smoked the meat. And there were strips of high quality bacon, and crisp, fresh lettuce and ripe tomato. But the real key besides the smoked meat was barbecue sauce, made there in the restaurant made there in the restaurant from the chef’s own recipe, not from a bottle, on the top bun, and mayonnaise, again made in the restaurant and not stuff from a jar on the bottom bun. You wouldn’t think a simple chicken sandwich would be memorable, but this one was. For this quality it was of course a bit more expensive than a standard sandwich, but not terribly expensive. IIRC it was in the $15-20 range.
Actually the same description could apply to the burger from Dad Kitchen I mentioned previously. There’s nothing particularly fancy about it, it’s just made with high quality ingredients.