Review: Alla Spina

By Glen Macnow

Score: 7.05
Price: $14 for the signature Burgamo Burger
Location: 1410 Mt. Vernon Street, Spring Garden.

Remember the first time you ever ate a Big Mac? All that "two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, special sauce on a sesame seed bun." It was great. But hey, your tastes have graduated from that. Your palate has refined, right?

Except that every once in a while I still get that hankering. So, apparently, does Marc Vetri, who runs this fun Italian beer bar. So he created The Burgamo, which has the same basic anatomy as a Big Mac – if McDonald's used gourmet-aisle ingredients. The double-decker beef patties are, we're told, a blend from Piedmontese cattle from the famous Pat LaFrieda meat purveyors. They're nicely grilled – charred outside, but still pink inside. Not easy with a small, four-ounce patty. We were also impressed with the tiny cubes of translucent onion, evocative of another old fast-food favorite, the White Castle burger. And praise for the sesame-seed laden potato roll, cooked right in-house.

Good, maybe even very good. A few steps short of great. So why didn't we rank this higher? Well, maybe it's a little gimmicky. Five bites in we realized why we haven't ordered a Big Mac in all these years.

Got a Great Hamburger Hunt nominee? Tweet Glen @RealGlenMacnow, or send an email to burgerhunt@cbsradio.com.