Last year, the chef Jeremy Fox started developing a recipe for a cheeseburger at his Santa Monica restaurant Birdie G’s. It affected him in strange ways.
“For the last more-than-a-decade, any mention of a burger was extremely triggering for me,” he wrote on Instagram, because it brought back memories of customers storming out of his other restaurant, Rustic Canyon.
There, “my marching orders were to get rid of the burger,” he said. “So people would actually order the farmers’ market dishes.”
For a decade, Santa Monica had been divided between two beloved burgers: the Father’s Office (Gruyère, caramelized onions, arugula, aioli) and the Rustic Canyon (Cheddar, pickles, onion fondue, herb rémoulade) created by the previous chef, Evan Funke.
But the drippy deliciousness of the Rustic Canyon burger had become an existential threat to the restaurant. Of 180 diners per night, said Mr. Fox, 75 to 80 would reliably order the burger, which was priced under $20. It generated little profit, and a lot of work, and the owners wanted it gone.
“All the food runners had time to do was fill up ramekins with aioli and ketchup and rémoulade,” he said. Also, customers inevitably expect burgers to conform to personal taste, removing pickles, adding mayonnaise and changing cheeses at will, with each component adding to chaos in the kitchen.
“Everyone loved it except us,” Mr. Fox said.
High-end restaurants have long served burgers, but usually as a concession to popular demand, not as part of an ambitious menu. Today, trained chefs who would once have considered a burger beneath them spend years developing personal meat blends and customized buns.
But ever since the trend took off in the early 2000s, chefs have nursed complicated feelings about their creations. Burgers bring in more customers, but they spend less. How much should your burger reflect your culinary skills and heritage? If the burger is a perfect composition of flavors, textures and temperatures, do you have to let customers change it? The main feeling restaurant chefs share about burgers, though, is exasperation. Each one is a feat of engineering, demanding attention from every station in the kitchen.
“It’s a love-hate relationship for sure,” said Angie Mar, who hugged the formula for her dry-aged burger to her chest for years as a sous-chef, saving it until she got to lead her own kitchen. Even before Vogue.com called her burger at Le B. “the “Birkin bag of burgers” in February, it was drawing lines, recalling the early days of the Cronut.
“I’m 110 percent proud of it,” she said. “But no matter what cuisine I create, or how accomplished I am, everyone will ask me about the burger.” That’s why Ms. Mar limits production to nine per night: one for each seat at the bar. (A line of hopefuls forms as early as 4:45 p.m.) “I could sell 900 a night,” she said. “But there is so much more that I want people to taste.” To manage the inevitable disappointments, Ms. Mar devised an ingenious solution: everyone who orders the seasonal tasting menu gets a midcourse “burger mignon,” a perfect three-bite version of the original.
In 2001, when the chef Daniel Boulud put a $27 burger of dry-aged beef stuffed with foie gras and black truffle on the menu of his then-new Midtown bistro, it became a global sensation, even before social media. (The Times restaurant critic William Grimes dedicated the first three paragraphs of his review of DB Bistro Moderne to it.)
It marked the beginning of the cheffed-up burger era, and also sparked a cultural conversation about the value of a burger that continues today.
“I can’t charge $35 for a burger in Kentucky, no matter how much it costs me,” said the chef Edward Lee, who developed a (bar-only) burger for Nami, his Korean American steakhouse in Louisville. “That would be impossibly elitist.”
Winning first runner-up in Netflix’s hit Korean cooking competition show, “Culinary Class Wars,” last year gave Mr. Lee the chance to sift through his feelings about burgers, ethnicity and authenticity. As a newly minted celebrity in Korea, Mr. Lee felt his multiple fast-food chains offered him the chance to create a signature burger. The first decision was easy: he was eager to work with a Korean brand, so instead of McDonald’s or Shake Shack (both are popular in South Korea), he chose the most popular local chain, Mom’s Touch.
The rest of the development process was more complex. “The cheeseburger is one of the only truly American, truly great culinary creations,” he said. Mr. Lee wanted to pay homage both to that and to his Korean roots. “It was like walking a tightrope.”
He’d assumed that kimchi would work as a stand-in topping for the classic American pickle slice, but the Mom’s Touch team said that would never work: because kimchi is a live, ever-fermenting food, it would taste different from one day to the next, and from one location to another. (The company has more than 1,500 stores in South Korea.)
In the end, he arrived at a burger with American cheese, bacon jam, bourbon barbecue sauce, sweet pickle slices and mayonnaise dosed with ssamjang that he felt was true to both American tradition and Korean taste. “It wasn’t until I saw my burger on a Mom’s Touch billboard that I realized the show was really a hit,” he said.
Even that journey could be considered relatively simple compared with the burger saga at Emily in Brooklyn.
The Emily burger, named for the chef Matt Hyland’s wife and partner, is one of the most renowned burgers in New York, and one of the first in the modern era to feature the pretzel roll, popular in the Midwest, as its bun. The burger’s breakout moment came in 2015, when the hamburger historian George Motz praised it in New York magazine (he was described as “pausing between bites only to emit low, ursine growls” as he ate it).
The Hylands’ business quickly expanded from a neighborhood restaurant in Clinton Hill into multiple brands and a separate pizza chain (Emmy Squared, with 30 locations nationwide). But they fell out with investors, and with each other, divorcing in 2019. Each of the brands now touts a signature burger, but confusion reigns among the Emily burger, the Emmy burger and Le Big Matt, none of which are precisely the same.
The original burger — thick medium-rare patty, caramelized onions, aged Cheddar, cornichons — is still served only at the original restaurant. Although the Hylands are no longer together, they still own that restaurant together, and share rights to the burger.
It demands far more attention than its cousins. “A single patty takes 20 minutes: You have to temper it, cook it, rest it, transfer it to a sizzle plate and then the oven to melt the cheese,” Mr. Hyland said. All the other restaurants, he said, use two thinner patties. “A double stack burger takes four minutes, start to finish.”
Rustic Canyon has now been burger-free for a decade. Over the course of a year, Mr. Fox weaned customers off it, reducing the number available each night to 36, then 24, to a dozen and then none. Denied a burger, “at first, people would just get up and leave,” he said. Eventually, it worked.
Now his journey has come full circle; in March, he added a $32 burger to the menu at Birdie G’s. Nothing attracts crowds quite like a signature burger, and since the pandemic, Birdie G’s has been laboring to fill its 180 seats.
“A burger is the only answer the suits in the restaurant business seem to have when you’re struggling,” he said, on a January day when he was stress testing the kitchen layout to see how a burger would move between stations. His current version — grilled over almond wood, cheese melted under a spun-iron cloche, butter-toasted Japanese milk bread bun — has the makings of a hit.
“I wasn’t super eager to put a burger on the menu,” he said. “But I’m not going to be a baby about it.“
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Julia Moskin covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking for The Times.
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