Somewhere between bites of the dripping cheeseburger, a word comes to mind that afternoon in 2005. It’s one Fleischman has been encountering often, on select food blogs and in books by the pioneering British chef Heston Blumenthal. That word is umami. The Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda came up with it in 1908 to describe a flavor that’s at the root of Japanese cooking, present in staples like fermented soy, seaweed, and the funky dried-fish broth dashi. Americans experience umami in different ways. It’s one reason they crave bacon. It’s why Italian grandmothers sneak anchovies into everything, and why something that smells like an old gym sock can taste like heaven. The professional food world has embraced the umami flavor as a unique fifth taste distinct from the sensations of sweet, sour, salt, and bitter.
Fleischman concludes that what he loves about an In-N-Out Double-Double isn’t the fresh ingredients or the to-order preparation. A hamburger, he realizes, is America’s preferred umami intake device. It is also consumed by the billions each year. “That was the aha moment for me,” says Fleischman. “I saw Umami’s financial potential right away.” (...)
After his umami revelation, Fleisch-man didn’t go on a fact-finding mission to Japan. (He still hasn’t, although he considers his dining experiences at Beverly Hills’ $325-a-head sushi restaurant Urasawa close enough.) Instead he dissolved his BottleRock partnership the following year and worked his way around town, consulting on a variety of other businesses. When similar dustups arose with partners at a second wine bar, Vinoteque, he’d had it. “I said, ‘OK, the next time there won’t be any partners. I’m going to do this all by myself.’ ”
In 2009, with $40,000 in his pocket from selling his stake in BottleRock, Fleischman decided to open a restaurant centered on the umami flavor. He knew that an umami-focused menu would attract a burgeoning breed of foodies who had been weaned on the Food Network and had developed a sort of teenybopper crush on the heady flavors of pork, organ meats, West Coast IPAs, and superripe cheeses. What his place would serve remained up in the air. As it happened, he settled on burgers.
Fleischman didn’t have a business degree or much experience in the food industry aside from helping his mother with her catering business as a kid. He certainly didn’t have any professional chef’s training, and his familiarity with hamburgers was limited to flipping a few in his backyard. But he did have a devout faith in his palate and a mean perfectionist streak that borders on the tyrannical.
On a late summer day he stepped into his kitchen armed with a bundle of Japanese ingredients he’d scooped up at Mitsuwa Marketplace in West L.A. He began to experiment with recipes, incorporating dashi, miso, fish sauce, and soy. He ground up fish heads and sprinkled them on top of ground beef and pork. He tried making Parmesan fondue and melting it over the patty. “It was a mess,” says Fleischman. Regardless, as a passionate, intellectually minded greenhorn, Fleischman—so he claims—created his masterpiece in a single day.
With that first burger-shaped umami bomb, Fleischman launched a brand that has not only changed the culinary landscape of L.A. but has turned its founder into a food industry powerhouse arguably as influential as Nancy Silverton or Wolfgang Puck. Since its debut in a former Korean taco stand on La Brea Avenue, Umami Burger has expanded into a multimillion-dollar restaurant group with financial backing from hospitality giant SBE. At present there are seven Umamis across L.A., one in San Francisco, and at least a dozen more in development nationwide. The Umami Group’s Neapolitan pizza place, 800 Degrees, recently opened in Westwood Village and continues to draw lines out the door. The newest addition is downtown’s 8,000-square-foot UmamIcatessen, which houses five food and beverage concepts. In the works are a scaled-down fast-food burger chain called Umami Ko and a line of Umami-brand condiments. The company also retains a controlling share of chef Jordan Kahn’s upscale Beverly Hills Vietnamese restaurant, Red Medicine. Umami Burger, however, remains the foundation of Fleischman’s realm.
The signature Umami burger isn’t some towering, sloppy menace that’s as impossible to grasp as it is to bite. It’s compact, almost cute, with a reasonable six-ounce patty served on an eggy, Portuguese-style bun that Fleischman sources from a top-secret local bakery. “The burger-to-bun ratio is key,” he says, “but it’s amazing that nobody ever gets that right.” Once cooked to the lowest, pinkest edge of medium rare, the meat is seasoned with the now-patented Umami Sauce and Umami Dust. “We don’t use MSG,” says Fleischman, despite many accusations to the contrary. The full recipe is classified, but he will allow that the sauce contains some soy sauce and the dust, some ground-up dried porcini mushrooms and dried fish heads, among other umami enhancers. Toppings include known umami heavy hitters such as oven-roasted tomatoes, shiitake mushrooms, caramelized onions, and a crisp Parmesan wafer. “Parmesan,” says Fleischman, “has the second-highest umami levels of any ingredient, and it has the most of any cheese.”
by Lesley Bargar Suter, Los Angeles Magazine | Read more:
Photograph by Misha Gravenor
