Jan. 9, 2024

This paid piece is sponsored by Vanguard Hospitality.

A Downtown Burger Battle entry involving ice cream? At Minervas in Sioux Falls?

Vanguard Hospitality CEO Ken Bashore had an instant, instinctive reaction when the culinary team pitched it.

“It was the easiest ‘no’ I could have ever said. No. That doesn’t represent us.”

Then, he tried it.

“The reason why I said no was because I didn’t understand how everything was going to blend together — the hot, the cold, the sweet, the spicy and the texture from the potato sticks and how it all blended together,” Bashore said. ”I didn’t understand that until I got it in my mouth.”

For Chef Tanner Mott, who led the development of the Root Beer Float Burger, “there was a lot of trial and error with this,” he said. “I always liked the idea of an ice cream on the burger … and added sweetness and acidity from the chipotle spread on it pairs very well together. I thought the best shot at winning is to do something no one else has done before.”

It took a lot of input from the Minervas team and plenty of taste-testers “to find the right consistency,” Mott said. “What to use for the ice cream was really tough. We didn’t want to be too frozen but still holding together as ice cream.”

General manager Chuck Geurts inspired the root beer float concept.

“So we went ahead with a root beer reduction,” Mott said. “I thought it would be very tough to convince the management at Minervas to like the burger, but I knew it worked well together, and all they had to do was try it, and once they did, everybody thought it was a great idea.”

The final version is a charbroiled Hadrick Ranch burger with frozen vanilla bean ice cream, root beer gastrique, chipotle aioli and potato straws, served with a side of fries.

“Hadrick Ranch beef is the best,” Mott said. “It’s the top of the line you can get in the area, and we went with it because it’s the best on the market.”

Mott has grown his culinary career for more than a decade, starting when he was 17 in the Minervas kitchen. He went on to work as a chef in Pierre and in Jackson, Wyoming, working on ranches seasonally before returning to Sioux Falls, where he also has worked part time as a naturalist at the Outdoor Campus, honing his passion for wild game and wild game cooking.

“I really mix the two together and just felt a calling to come back to Minervas,” he said. “I wanted to take all that knowledge I learned out West and bring it back to Sioux Falls.”

With the Root Beer Float Burger, he and the culinary team definitely make a statement.

“We’ve had a lot of people come in already, and the feedback has been outstanding,” Bashore said. “People are like: ‘Holy cow. I get it. It makes sense.’ There’s 37 restaurants competing in this, and quite frankly whether you win or lose the competition, everybody that participates wins because it brings so many people downtown.”

People can be “a bit apprehensive to try it at first, but it’s the same reaction I got showing it to the ownership,” Mott said. “They were like, ‘I’m not sure,’ but once they bit into it, they said, ‘Wow, why is this good?’ And it just gets better with each bite.”

Order the Root Beer Float Burger at Minervas, 301 S. Phillips Ave., through January. Hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.