Baby Got Burgers and Beer

I like big burgers and I cannot lie. So when a mysterious Russian spy showed up one day with an envelope stamped "Highly Confidential", containing the invitation to an ultra-uber-secret burgers and beers tasting event, I accepted with a coded handshake.

Actually, what really happened was that Lincoln Goh, the gregarious, always-smiling owner of The Drinking Partners and my lifeline to craft Belgian brews, dropped me an email saying, "Hey Des, want to have burgers and beers? But please keep it secret." And the truth is I accepted immediately, so quickly I almost typo'd "YES", since the only casualty was postponing the start of my Intro to Broadway dance class by a week. The reality is, the prevalence of burgers and beers (together with pizza) in my life could very well be the reason I am single, for a suitable suitor would have to fight hard for my affections.

The mysterious meat-up was hosted at Fatboy's - The Burger Bar, and honestly, if you want a burger that's worth its girth, you'd want a fat boy making it. This is Bernie, the owner.

Bernie the burger baron.

At Fatboy's, you can either order one of the specialty burgers ("Fat Basterd", "The Elvis") or build your own, complete with accoutrements such as grilled banana, wild arugula, sambal tumis and roasted garlic aioli. There are also a variety of bar snacks, other sandwiches, meatballs, a breakfast fry-up, fish and chips and fried chicken, but to hell with all that - we were there for Burgatory. Burgatory is the newest specialty burger at Fatboy's, created to celebrate the first year of its opening, and after many hours of research and development, has been determined to pair most beautifully with Satan Gold by Lincoln and Bernie, one of the beers available from The Drinking Partners. You can get Burgatory and a bottle of Satan in a package deal for $25, but at this secret rendezvous, we were the first to taste this boomer of a burger and canoodle with as much Satan as we want - the devil's in the details.

Burgatory is 200 grams of beef patty between a sesame seed bun with homemade chili holding it all together, served with a side of steak fries. I wondered if the lettuce and tomato slice made up a side salad or was meant for the burger - the former, I imagine, because putting vegetables on a burger like Burgatory would be like sending virgins into Snoop Dogg's mansion. I wished there had been more steak fries - it's rare to get good steak fries in Singapore, and these were done just right - crisp along the edges that trickily morph into a belly flop middle, and a nice fluff on the inside. It was like a steak fry for all seasons, and it is rare that I eat fries without my usual condiment mash-up of Tabasco and ketchup, which I did.

Would Burgatory have me at hell-o?

Obviously, I'd been a good girl because Burgatory wasn't too spicy nor overwhelming for me. Having been to the depths of the Louisiana bayou, Zanzibar spice plantations, Mexican grottos and back, I know hot, and hot this chili wasn't. In fact, it tasted pleasant and cloying, like an impish slather that played along, rather than slayed the tongue. I'm not advocating a chili so uncomfortably blazing that you can't enjoy your burger, but I was hoping for it to at least kick me in the taste buds. It just felt like a move by Kung Fu Panda - cuddly, cute, but not very scary. The chili was also set in remoulade, which made me feel dirty because I always believe chili had to be pure ground beef macho muscle that had been stewed in spices and other of its own devices - amid a femininely light orange cream, it took some of the edge off and just like that, the cliffhanger was gone.

The patty, however, was a hunk. It's hard to go wrong with handmade patty from good beef that's lean and nicely medium rare - the trickle of blood that oozed into the chili made the remoulade blush. And when you've got such brawn, you need brains, and that's where Satan came in. A curvaceous 8% ABV, this is a prototypical example of a fine Belgian brew - rounded, sweet and full-bodied, all packaged in a gorgeous gold hue. It's easy to drink this without thinking, so smoothly it traverses through your intestinal tract before making friends with your liver, completely bypassing your nervous system, and I can think of 666 reasons why this should reside in your beer cellar or fridge (serving temperature lies between eight to 10 degrees Celcius), but the best one is simply that you'll enjoy it.

Put on your thinking horns.

A beer like Satan - like the devil himself - goes with many things, such as hearty red meat and hearty company, and once Burgatory was over, we found ourselves in ha-ha heaven, which is to say, we told funny stories and slapped each other on the back and weakly resisted as our glasses were refilled, or the equivalent to burgers + beer + buddies = bliss.