Menu Highlight: Kawa Ni in Westport Introduces "The Katsu Burger"
Chris Gonzalez is never surprised when people (including me) bring up Hapa Food Truck, specifically THAT burger. You know the one. Juicy grass-fed beef, a thick strip of tender pork belly, ultra caramelized onions, Vermont cheddar, lettuce and tomato, all between an eye catching purple ube bun.
Admit it. You miss it.
But those days are gone and these days are now.
Gonzalez, now the chef at Kawa Ni, has, along with owner Bill Taibe, created another show stopper of a burger that’ll have you talking. That is, if you can get your hands on one.
A burger at Kawa Ni is something that Gonzalez and Taibe talked about doing for a while, but there were a few things in the way, namely, when (as Kawa Ni is an often-busy kitchen without doing a fancy burger) and how.
“It took us a couple months to fine tune it,” Gonzalez explains. “We messed with ‘how do we make it Kawa Ni?’ We can’t just do something normal, so Bill and I went back and forth on what to do. We fooled around on ChatGPT and ‘what’s a Japanese burger?’ and a picture of a katsu burger came up.”
Part of Gonzalez’s thought process was thinking about what makes a burger a good burger.
“Bread, and you know me, I’m a big fan of caramelized onions, plus, the beef, the cheese, and a good sauce,” he says. “Diving in, how do we make each component the best?”
With katsu being the idea, thanks to the artificial intelligence suggestion, they ran with it. And they didn’t have to run very far to start, so across the street they went to Kneads to first nail down a proper Japanese milk bun.
“They mill their own flour and we want that level of artisanship from people we work with,” Gonzalez says. “They showed us different types of buns, diving deeper into sifted and non-sifted flours, and they put together a nice spread for us to try. Some were too wheaty. After a few weeks of back and forth, they nailed it.”
For cheese, they’d decide on another Connecticut brand, Cato Corner Farm, and their Aged Bloomsday, a 9–12-month aged cheddar that’s not only melty, but provides sharpness and a good bite of funk.
And the beef? Also, courtesy of an across the street neighbor, Saugatuck Provisions, that’s ground fresh daily, and that’s less than 80% lean, resulting in a fattier, more flavorful burger.
Gonzalez’s R&D involved testing the cooking time on several burgers, toying with the timing by mere seconds to nail that “pink” or “no pink” depending how you like your burger’s temperature. It’s coated in Japanese panko with salt and nori and each patty is NOT seared off first. All the crunch comes from the fry.
The burger’s other components are curry kewpie mayo, thinly sliced house brined pickles (you’ll get crisp pickle in every bite), and instead of lettuce, shaved cabbage tossed with their own yuzu koshō—a fermented paste made from chilis, yuzu peel, and salt.
“We had to take it in a flavor direction that you won’t see anywhere else—that was important to me,” Gonzalez says. “It’s a katsu, so that’s bread on bread, so we wanted those components to counteract the salt, beef, and the bread.”
Sound good?
Well, if that’s stirring something up in your soul, we should probably talk about that “if you can get your hands on one” part.
Pretty simply, this is a Thursday special. They make ONLY 15 katsu burgers on that day. Kawa Ni opens for lunch at noon every Thursday. Once someone orders one, the rest of the dining room usually follows their lead. Consider yourself lucky if one actually makes it to dinner service.
