Have you ever noticed that even a bad cheeseburger can still be pretty sating? But a great one, thoughtfully constructed in ingredients and proportions, is the kind of dopamine-raising ritual that makes life worth living. “It’s like taking a bite of a book,” Alex Leo-Guerra, the creator of a global burger map, said in a 2020 TEDx Talk, describing the sensation of eating a good burger. “You get so much information.”
When I moved to New York City as an adult, my celebration dinner most weekends was a cheeseburger and fries from the diner down the street. That first bite always hit the spot in ways that few other things could.
Recipe: Spicy Jalapeño Cheeseburgers
When my household went from one to two, it was easy to share my weekend burger ritual with my new roommate, because it was his as well. One Friday night a couple of years ago, we decided to try 7th Street Burger, which had just opened a new location down the block in Downtown Brooklyn and quickly became our spot. We would place our order online, pick it up, then bring it home to eat in front of the television. Washed down with Mexican Sprite, that burger became a regular treat for us, a pretty bow to top off the workweek.
On a recent rainy morning, my partner and I met Kevin Rezvani, who founded and owns 7th Street Burger with Paras Jain, at the original store in the East Village. Though we had always loved his burger, we ate the best version of it that day, standing in Thompson Square Park in the rain. It didn’t just hit the spot; it smashed it. Rezvani created a product without bells and whistles, which is exactly what makes his cheeseburger so great. He can look at a patty cooking and tell you if the grill is hot enough.
It takes years to become a master burger flipper, but it’s worth the practice.
“All I know is burgers,” he said, having flipped them at Burger King and Arby’s in his youth, as well as having opened (but eventually sold) a smash-burger business in New Jersey, where he grew up.
It takes years to become a master burger flipper, in other words, but it’s worth the practice. This special recipe and technique, from Rezvani and his “Day 1 employee” Jose Arnaud, teaches you that the best burgers are griddled hot and fast on a flat surface. At home, all you need is an ordinary skillet: Stainless steel gives you the best Maillard reaction, the browning that makes food taste good, but cast iron works, too. Restaurant chefs rely on steak weights for this old-fashioned “smash” effect, which retains the meat’s juiciness while encouraging crisp edges, but you can use any heavy saucepan with a flat bottom. In time, cooking up a last-minute cheeseburger can be as fast and as seamless as making a grilled cheese.
Though the double is popular at 7th Street, a single patty is my preference, with a layer of fresh jalapeño coins that turn bright blue-green from the burger’s residual heat, a pickle chip for acid and a generous slather of the restaurant’s secret sauce. Rezvani wouldn’t tell us what was in the sauce that made it so secret. (Most restaurants won’t, but that’s part of the allure.) What he did share was that it doesn’t have ketchup, a nod to the Big Mac sauce that topped the McDonald’s double cheeseburgers he grew up ordering.
The sauce is where you can play. At CBG, a bar and grill in Portland, Maine, the smash burger comes with a béarnaise sauce, its mayonnaise quality lending Burger King vibes. At RedHot Ranch in Chicago, a special rémoulade-inspired sauce harks back to In-N-Out’s orange-pink spread. The ultimate joy of a homemade cheeseburger lies in writing your own story: Give out as much (or as little) information as you want.
Eric Kim has been a food and cooking columnist for The Times since 2021. You can find his recipes on New York Times Cooking.
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