I’ve been thinking about these fries for months.
Back in June, Le Burger 4304 chef Jonathan Gans told the Star Tribune that at the forthcoming south Minneapolis restaurant, he and co-owner Josh Hoyt would be spending “an inordinate amount of time and effort to make really delicious French fries. Hand cut and three times cooked, and all the stuff.”
If you’re the kind of person who takes their fries seriously, this remark might lodge itself in your brain, receding for days or weeks at a time and then pushing its way to the front of your mind whenever you had a burger.
Well, Le Burger 4304—so-called because of its address, 4304 Upton Ave. S. in Linden Hills—opened in November. It’s time to try the fries.
Le Burger’s atmosphere is like if a classic diner was also a kindergarten classroom. In the front dining room, circular tables are surrounded by cutesy plastic chairs in primary colors, while the back dining area is full of baby-blue banquettes. Plates emerge from the kitchen arranged on bright-yellow trays, and frames on the cinderblock walls are full of squiggly abstract shapes.
Upon entering, you pick up a menu, snag a seat, and then order at the bar, choosing from a streamlined selection of burgers and sandwiches (les burgers), roasted chicken (le poulet roti), and snacks (les snacks). There are also a few salads (les salades) and soft serve for dessert (no French on the menu here, but linguee.com says you could probably use “crème glacée.”)
Gans and Hoyt were the executive chef and director of operations, respectively, of The Bachelor Farmer, the award-winning, Dayton-owned, Scandinavia-meets-Midwest North Loop restaurant that closed during the pandemic's earliest days. As you may have deduced from the preceding paragraph, this new venture leans a lil French—the duo has described it as the kind of burger joint a pair of Americans might open in Paris. (For the sake of the bit, please know that I’m pronouncing it “Par-ee” in my head, and I encourage you to do the same.)
We ordered two burgers—L’Américain ($12) et La Bouf ($15)—along with American cheese gougeres ($8) and a salad maison ($10). And of course, we got les pommes frites ($5), served with “le sauce.”
The bar at Le Burger features prominently; it’s where you place your order and it takes up a good chunk of the room. But the drink list is pretty trim, and nearly everything is on tap, from a “hoppy beer” and “lager beer” available for six bucks each to the wine to the cocktails. The NA options are solid: There’s a root beer float, Shirley Temple, Arnie Palmer, and pomegranate lemonade, along with zero-proof wine from Dry Wit and a Phony Negroni. We were sipping a lager beer and Dry Wit’s Salinger when the food arrived, all wrapped in adorable Le Burger-branded paper.
Having spent almost none of my life in Paris (Par-ee), I must here confess that I don’t actually know what kind of burgers two Americans would go to France and serve. Not cultured enough! But these burgers would be good ambassadors: L’Américain is classically delicious, with Cooper’s American cheese, mayo, mustard, lettuce, tomato, and onion. What if McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese was the absolute best, cheffiest version of itself? This is the question Le Burger answers, deliciously.
La Boeuf is a burger of a different flavor, with smoked bacon and cheddar, fried onion, and pickled jalapeño. That smoky heat intermingles with just enough barbecue sauce to lend a hint of sweetness—overall, it’s powerfully savory, with a playful amount of spice tingling around your senses.
Les burgers sont rich, but not quite as fatty as some of the other wagyu burgers I’ve had—we didn’t have grease cascading down our hands as we tore into them. That could be because you’re not working with the towering beef patty sometimes associated with a wagyu burger; these are thinner and more smash burger-adjacent, though not paper-thin. There’s still a discernible burger patty situated between the sesame seed-coated buns.
The salad maison, with wonderfully crispy bits of fried garlic, fits the bill if you want to eat something green that’s also under a pile of shaved parm. And as for those thrice-cooked fries? They’re really good, crispier’n hell, and laced with some sort of salty, garlicky magic that’ll keep you going back for bite after bite (while simultaneously making you very grateful for the lager you ordered). I don’t want to undersell it: great fries.
But of the snacks, it was the gougeres that really wowed me. Puffy, airy, crispy, doughy; somehow both marvelously cheesy and impressively light, and served alongside a ranch de provence so herby it was almost vegetal. “I could eat 100 of them,” I wrote in my notes, and I think I could. But such a feat of eating—well, it seems decidedly un-French, non?
Le Burger 4304
Address: 4304 Upton Ave. S., Minneapolis
Hours: Sunday-Thursday: 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday-Saturday: 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
