The Butcher on Burgers

The burger will be an oft-covered and much-discussed subject on The Butcher Blog. Our position on the burger is this: Burgers are the most commonly abused food item in America—and also one of the best. A great burger is as rare as a great steak. Its sheer simplicity and perfection has been obscured by decades of processing, marketing and unnecessary tinkering. Don’t mess with the burger. It doesn’t need a nickname, a cartoon character named after it, or a slogan. It also doesn’t need to be packed with foie gras, crab meat or topped with a quail egg. We don’t dismiss craft and complexity, but if that craft and complexity serve only to obscure the burger’s basic mission, then you’re wasting your time and ours.

We also don’t believe in burger hype. It’s our position that certain burgers receive far more accolades than they deserve. For instance, the Shake Shack burger is an overrated burger. There’s a certain cache that the Shake Shack burger enjoys because of its provenance (Danny Meyer created, Pat LaFrieda supplied, in a park) that rewards atmosphere and ancestry over quality. Don’t get us wrong, it’s a fine burger—but one of the best around, it is certainly not. In the end it’s the dame with great gams and a butterface.

Burgers and Atmosphere (see also, above): Often a decent burger will be elevated to “great” status due to the atmosphere or the moment. We recognize these moments—we’ve never had a bad burger on the Fourth of July at the beach—but we will endeavor to critically evaluate the burger both in context and also in the abstract, as a burger, and only a burger.

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