XO Grill

Review

Triumph of the burger

Let's talk about hypes. Why do people line up for sweet tea with fluffy balls in it, for colorful donuts or for bland wraps and end up paying absurdly high sums for the lumpy stuff?
Sociologists and psychologists could explain this, perhaps the desire to belong plays a role.
Now, thanks to social media, these trends happen surprisingly quickly, and if one day cow scare was all the rage, the next it's a selfie with a bowl of quinoa with colorful vegetables on it.
So far, so negligible. But the burger hype is a different story.
The infiltration of the local gastronomy scene by the burger began in 2008 with a small restaurant in Burggasse called "Die Burgermeister", in which two graduates of the Slow Food University offered high-quality burgers with homemade ketchup, which was almost provocative and therefore funny.
However, the "noble burger" spread virally, almost epidemically, and virtually every restaurant that opens today has burgers on the menu.
Chains like Le Burger or Burger Bros. have sprung up, for many young people "going out to eat" is synonymous with "going out for a burger" (or pizza), the day when they voluntarily pay 20 euros for a burger is near.
A week ago Monday, the American fast food chain Five Guys opened its first restaurant on Graben and the number of people queuing for two hours for a 13-euro conveyor belt burger exceeded the number of visitors to most anti-corona demonstrations.
Three days earlier, a burger joint had also opened in the Alimentary, the tiny premises of the St. Charles pharmacy, albeit a very different one. The X.O. Grill is the gastronomic offshoot of an interesting meat project: Robert Weishuber is looking for the best meat for his X.O. Beef, based on the Basque Txogitxu beef, Robert Weishuber looks for particularly old, fat pasture-raised dairy cows from the foothills of the Alps, matures the meat for seven weeks and thus provides a product that top chefs would not want to be without at the moment.
At the X.O. Grill, former Filippou chef Timo Ahrens and Valentin Gruber-Kalteis, who previously made a name for himself at Blue Mustard, make two take-away dishes from the meat. Last week, they were a spicy, very good Indonesian Rendang beef curry (€ 11.90), which is not really easy to eat in a burger patty, and - trara! - a burger.
Which I would actually have liked to try, even though I don't think a burger is the right vehicle to determine the quality of beef and I don't like paying twelve euros for a patty. But it was sold out after two attempts anyway.
Summary:
Is it cultural imperialism if everyone just wants to eat more burgers? Perhaps. The burger from the new X.O. Grill was quickly sold out.

X.O. Grill ., Gumpendorfer Str. 33, daily 12-14.30, 16.30-19 h

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