Hunt Club

inside the Sorrento Hotel
900 Madison St
206-343-6156

I wanted one thing, AND ONE THING ONLY, from the Hunt Club: a fucking cheeseburger. You see, cheeseburgers are like currency to me. If I was somehow elected Emperor of Earth tomorrow the first thing I would do would be to abolish money and replace it with cheeseburgers. Different denominations would be determined by how good the burger was: one of those shitty little McDonald's bitchburgers would be a penny. Dick's cheeseburgers would be nickels. A Whopper, Jr. would be a dime. A Whopper would be a quarter. The Jumbo Jack would be a fifty cent piece. Red Robin would be a dollar. Are you tired of this yet? I am.

Anyway, you'd think that if I were elected Emperor of Earth I'd have bigger fish to fry (other than destroying the global economy by replacing money with burgers, of course), but no: like some chief executives I'm too lazy to tackle any REAL problems, and besides, this whole paragraph is a simple thought exercise anyway. After all, everyone knows I could never be elected Earth Emperor! I'm not eligible because I smoked pot once. And also because I never think of the children. People always want politicians to think about children: “Please, won't someone think of the CHILDREN?” No.

So we ended up at the Hunt Club in the Sorrento Hotel, mostly because it was the only place open. I wanted to go to Quinn's for their Wagyu bacon cheeseburger, which is damn tasty, but those pussies were closed. “Boo, hoo,” I imagined those whiners at Quinn's sniveling, “it's New Year's Day! We want to be with our families!” Fuck your family, Quinn's. I was up until 5 am partying the night before (if you consider an all night Yahtzee marathon “partying,” that is). I was hungover and wanted a goddamned burger!

As a result, I settled for the Huntsburger, which according to the menu features “Huntsman Cheese,” which sounds more like some putrid genital rash than a really delicious dairy product. Also, you should be warned that the Huntsburger is $16. Yes, that's right: all of the money I made selling your mom into white slavery in Moscow went right into that burger.

The meat was still pink inside, and juicy, but the burger meat itself was rather bland. The bun was just a regular grocery store sesame seed bun. It came with a pile of romaine lettuce, sliced red onion rings, and tomatoes. The lettuce was crisp, and the tomatoes were pretty good for this time of year. Two ramekins, one of ketchup and one of a mixture of coarse mustard and mayonnaise, graced the side of the plate in case you wanted condiments.

The fries were the biggest disappointment. They were of the shoestring variety, and tasted like frozen french fries, which seems reprehensible considering the price tag. For $16 I'd expect hand- cut pommes frites with truffle oil, or at the very least some iridescent magical flying beetle fries conjured by Harry Potter himself. Or maybe it could be the same frozen fries, only delivered to you by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Those fries better smell like sunshine and taste like rainbows, for that kind of scratch. But of course we don't always get what we want. Besides, everyone knows hotel restaurants always treat your wallet the way Mike Tyson treats his cell mate: they anally rape you using your own blood as lube (and then they don't call you after), in case you didn't understand that clever topical comparison.

Was the Huntsburger worth it? In and of itself, fuck no. But the swanky fucking décor inside the Sorrento Hotel has got to be worth something. Actually, I know what the décor is worth: it's worth exactly $16. So I guess I broke even. If the Huntsburger were a piece of Imperial currency in my new monetary scheme, it would be a counterfeit $2 bill. So there.

Merry New Year, dickfaces.

UPDATE 1/19/09:

In my haste to disparage these fucknoses ( at least partially because this review was written in a rare moment of complete sobriety), I forgot to mention that the Huntsburger is a BACON cheeseburger. And I also forgot to mention the very important fact that the bacon on the Huntsburger is fucking awesome. It's thick, juicy, smoky, salty bacon, and as flat as a board. They must've cooked it with one of those bacon presses because it was perfectly flat. Perfectly 2- dimensional. And there was plenty of it too. I would make that bacon my wife if it was legal to marry meat products. Hopefully Canada legalizes baconsexual weddings soon.

Unfortunately the rest of the Huntsburger was as mediocre as the bacon was delicious. How delicious was that bacon? Tasty enough, in fact, to single- handedly pull the Huntsburger's rating up from 3 to 4. You might not think one point is very much, but I do, and it's MY rating system so fuck off.

Rating: 4 dollar bills out of 10