For a restaurant critic, the veggie burger presents a problem.

Placed next to a standard-issue ground beef burger, it surely comes out the loser. Even in its ideal form – and whether made of quinoa, farro, garbanzo beans and studded with corn – it is rarely as juicy as its meaty cousin, and it doesn’t carry that irresistible crust which ground beef on a hot grill produces.

All things being equal – that is, bun, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, fixins accounted for – a veggie burger is, quite simply, not quite as tasty as the real thing. But if you really consider what delicious means beyond momentary oral elation, it’s a clear winner.

It’s early evening and a line already runs up the few steps of the East Village’s Superiority Burger and onto the sidewalk. The jewel-box sized restaurant opened in June and serves all-vegetarian fare.

The place is the passion project of Brooks Headley, a former pastry chef at New York’s four-star restaurant Del Posto. Headley, a hardcore drummer by vocation, grew up entrenched in Washington DC’s punk scene, where veganism and vegetarianism is worn more as an act of rebellion than of longhaired ideals.

Headley had long been obsessed with veggie burgers – from the commodity corn Sysco discs available at diners to the proto-artisanal burgers at places like My Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland, California. For the last few years, he had been diddling around with his own recipe. “I wanted to make a veggie burger with real food,” he said.

Superiority Burger is his all-in bet that the public will decide the veggie burger is, indeed, compelling enough to have for dinner.

Part of his plan is to make his burgers as tasty as possible, and he uses the skills he learned in fine dining to do so. Nearly every morning, Headley heads to the Greenmarket and turns the grains and products found there into patties, as well as the sides that accompany them (a charred cucumber salad was a recent special).

Headley argues that 90% of the hamburger experience is independent of the burger. “The visceral act of eating a burger is about its relationship with the bun, the ketchup, the iceberg lettuce,” he said. A good burger is like the John Donne of sandwiches: no ingredient is an island.

To reach this height of tastiness, he borrows the traditional White Castle burger setup: a potato bun, Muenster cheese, iceberg lettuce, plum tomatoes, brown honey mustard and sliced pickles. In fact, there’s a vintage poster from White Castle, another one of Headley’s myriad passions, that hangs in the shop. It reads: “Hamburger for Breakfast. Why not?”

Answering this question, Headley puts it this way, and it’s difficult to disagree with him: “In other areas of life, you don’t have the mentality of, ‘If it’s delicious, I’m going to do it.’” In fact, in few other arenas of one’s moral universe can one justify the unbridled pursuit of pleasure as the ultimate goal.

There is, no doubt, an almost indescribable pleasure in a cheeseburger. Books have been written, blogs have been started, memes have been made extolling the sensorial ecstasies associated with a ground beef patty, a slice of cheese, a pillow of potato roll and a blood-red tomato.

But there is pleasure to be had in heroin too, yet few of us champion that pleasure. Meat, especially red meat, is indisputably bad. It’s deleterious for one’s health, and certainly that of the cow. It’s toxic for the earth and its atmosphere.

According to a study by the Harvard Health Center, one daily serving of unprocessed red meat is associated with a 13% increased risk of mortality, while one daily serving of processed meat is associated with a 20% increased risk. As for the environment, the Environmental Working Group found that for every kilogram of beef consumed, 27 kg of CO2 are released into the atmosphere.

Why should it be considered poppycock to float the idea that we should think of more than the mechanics of taste​?

And as to whether hamburgers are bad for cows, good luck trying to find a cow to ask.

Veggie burgers are, on the other hand, pretty benign. And that isn’t irrelevant to the question of whether the thing itself is delicious. For deliciousness is the manifestation of beauty in food. It is the aesthetic ideal to which dinner aspires. Paintings are beautiful, music is harmonious, dinner is delicious.

The beauty to be found isn’t in a single flavor but in the balance of flavors and the intricate arrangement of textures and tastes. It isn’t simply the patty, veggie or beef. It’s the way the patty snuggles into the bun, the mutually ennobling contrast of pickle with tomato, tomato with lettuce, lettuce with mustard, mustard with patty.

In a veggie burger, particularly the mindful slider-sized offerings at Superiority, the same pleasing fairness one finds in a cheeseburger is present. Those equitable ratios, that age-old ingredient alchemy of a burger, are maintained. But in place of former cow is quinoa, whose harvest caused pain to no one. Instead of clogging one’s arteries, it provides protein and fiber and amino acids. Instead of gumming the atmosphere, this one clears it. And here is the veggie burger’s ace in the hole.

As Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics and ethics at Harvard University, notes in her book On Beauty and Being Just, fairness – though we could substitute deliciousness in our case – refers “not only to loveliness of countenance [but also to the] ethical requirement for ‘being fair’, ‘playing fair’ and ‘fair distribution’.”

It sounds hoity-toity, but the idea is just as applicable to burgers as it is to fine dining or the fine arts.

And this augurs well for the veggie burger. A hamburger is a catalyst for a bunch of harmful follow-on, the eating of which can only be justified by saying: “Well, it tastes good!”

A veggie burger, even though not quite as appetising, does little harm. Which is more important?

Why should it be considered eye-roll inducing poppycock to float the idea that perhaps we should be thinking of something more than the pure mechanics of taste?

And when one does, it becomes clear: one needn’t send to know for whom the burger tolls. It tolls for thee.