Bonus Room
tot redemption, with Demi Adejuyigbe
Every time I’ve been to Bonus Room has been after 10pm so their burger has evaded me in favor of smaller, lighter bites thanks to the esophagus passed down by my Italian-Ashkenazi forefathers. Tums! Prevacid! Sponsor me!
I finally popped in at a digestionally appropriate hour a few weeks ago when Demi Adejuyigbe selected this Ridgewood spot from the ever-expanding To Try section of my burger spreadsheet. Demi is someone who has been on my internet-radar for nearly ten years, at first through Vine, Twitter, and podcasts, now on Dropout and his one-man show Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going To Do one (1) Backflip, which I had the pleasure of seeing at The Bell House last year.
The Bonus Room burger is a single smash on a Martin’s potato roll, kind of a perfect dive bar bite. The burger is over a bed of shredded lettuce and thinly sliced white onion and topped with pickles, with a generous amount of their special sauce on the top AND bottom buns. Tots are included with your burger for $20, with a $1 up-charge for fries. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Demi also prefers a burger sans cheese (WE ARE EVERYWHERE) and that we’re also both not huge tot fans but I vouched for the BR tots.
As I’ve shared before, I feel like burgers at a lower price point can sometimes rely on their cheese for umami, but Bonus Room was able to avoid this fate. Between the well seasoned beef and the Sauce Bath the burger was in, I wasn’t missing out on flavor or salt. Admittedly, the volume of sauce led to some messiness and slippage. At one point I found myself slurping up the shredduce and onion pieces spaghetti style. I’d opt to keep the sauce on the non-lettuce side and maybe a dice of the onion for a cleaner bite.
In between bites (and slurps) Demi and I agreed that the tots exceeded expectations since we’re both used to the standard, sadder, soggier tater tot. Since he’s in town for a full month, we chatted about what shows he’s planning to see, our respective mayoral woes and local film labs when he got this wonderful shot of me, developed at Luster!
While Demi was here with a wide ranging agenda, we also connected about wanting to do more traveling with very narrow objectives - a concert, a restaurant, one specific sight to see. Sometimes you forget that you’re allowed to be a little frivolous and hyper-intentional without a whole mission statement behind your trip, cost-permitting of course. You don’t always have to be Eat, Pray, Love-ing, it can just be a vacation to watch an artist that’s doing one single show on the other side of the world or a really good sandwich.
When all was said and done, there was considerable carnage left behind on my wax paper, but I was satisfied with my meal. I’m ranking the Bonus Room burger at 28, between the Anchored Inn and Strange Flavor Pop burgers.
One of my favorite things Demi was involved in was Punch Up The Jam, a podcast that he departed in 2019 and which ended its initial run in 2020. It’s funny, earnest and even educational, with Demi and co-host Miel Bredouw “punching up” the focal song at the end of the show. An episode I always come back to is the Ghostbusters episode, Demi’s last, where he compiled an absolutely insane megamix to close out the show.
Demi’s musical chops are on display throughout his work but I wanted to point my fellow Burger Divas towards one project in particular, a mix that he made and used for pre-show music on his Backflip shows. Anything spent on this track will go towards a breakfast fund that feeds the residents of MacArthur Park in LA every Thursday morning - run it up!
Great job! ❤️
Big get!