Every Restaurant Needs a Burger
The Sanctuary Burger
Chefs Words: It is an asian inspired burger, that is massive. It’s honestly pretty messy to eat due to the sauce, but it is packed with flavor! It pairs great with a glass of saki, or a pint of Sapporo. Wash the whole thing down with a saki bomb and get your night started!
From our Bar Menu: 1/2 lb seasoned blended wagyu beef patty (chuck, brisket, & ribeye), topped with caramelize shallots, green onions, shiitake mushrooms, locally sourced greens, seaweed salad, swiss cheese, and our house sauce. Served on a garlic butter toasted brioche bun.
It has been said that every restaurant needs a good burger, but our goal wasn’t just to create a good burger. Our goal was to create an amazing burger that was different than what you would find anywhere else. We wanted to create a burger that was as unique as the Sanctuary and we did just that.
Like all dishes on The Sanctuary Menu the burger started with a vision and a memory from the past. Our chef wanted to recreate what he considered to be the best burger he had ever tasted, which was created by one of the many restaurants that are sadly no longer in business. The burger that the Sanctuary Burger is inspired by was actually found in the lounge area of a sushi restaurant in North Carolina. While the venue had amazing sushi what our chef really visited for the burger paired with saki (and maybe a saki bomb or two). Essential the burger was simply a wagyu mushroom Swiss burger, but that burger of all the burgers is the one that chef has compared all other burgers to since. At The Sanctuary we took that memory and made it better!
The Meat: The heart and soul of every burger is the meat! Like the burger from chefs past, we knew it had to be Wagyu but there is a lot of wagyu out there. Like usual in our kitchen that means we had to taste a lot of ground wagyu from a lot of different places! After going through about 20 different ground wagyu’s from all over the world we settled with a wagyu blend from one of our favorite wagyu suppliers; Snake River Farms. The product we use is known as a Wagyu Pioneer Burger, which includes a blend of 60% Chuck, 20% Brisket and 20% Ribeye. You can order these same patties direct to your door for your next burger adventure! The patty is seasoned with our house blend of seasoning and then seared on a cast iron skillet to medium rare. To ensure a nice juicy burger, we never press our burgers. After all it isn’t a smash burger!
The Bun: While the meat is heart and soul of a burger; you can’t have an amazing burger without a good quality bun. We utilize an amazing brioche bun, but it’s not just the bread that makes this bun amazing. We toast our buns with our house made bone marrow butter and garlic!
The Cheese: While we may have ventured to the midwest for our meat in The Sanctuary burger, the cheese is sourced right here in Vermont from Cabot Creamery. Cabot’s Swiss Cheese is pleasantly nutty with a mild sweet taste, a semi-soft texture, and a perfectly smooth finish. It melts perfectly for a gooey coating over the top of the amazing fixings of our burger.
The Greens: On our menu we state that the greens on our burger are locally sourced, but we don’t actually say where they are coming from, or what type of greens we are using. The reason for this is simple, it is because it changes on a regular basis. We utilize a mix of fresh greens that we normally source from the Rutland Farmers Market, just one block down the street from our location. The supplier we use and the exact greens we are using changes weekly based on who has the freshest and best looking greens on a given week. Those locally sourced greens are not the only type of green found on our burger. The burger also features a seaweed salad. Clearly since Vermont has no bordering oceans, this is not a locally sourced ingredient; we had to import it but we do still source if from New England. Our Seaweed Salad comes to use premade and originates in Boston Massachusetts; to be specific if comes from Fish Pier West, right on the water.
The Fixings: In While the beef, bun, cheese, and greens make up the bulk of our burger, it’s important not to forget about the amazing other fixings that round out our burger; which include caramelized shallots, green onions, and shiitake mushrooms. We are going to be honest about this we don’t always know where these items come from. When possible we do source them locally at the Rutland Farmers Market just like we do with our greens but lets face it here in Vermont it gets pretty cold, so during the winter produce is often in short supply. When we are unable to obtain them locally from small business vendors we do turn to big distributors to cover these items.
The Sauce: As is often the case with our featured dish posts, we are not going to give away everything in our dishes. With our burger, the one thing we are going to keep private is our sauce. What we will say is that it is 100% house made at the Sanctuary in our kitchen using an assortment of herbs, spices, oils, and even some saki.