The Year We Got Smashed
Smash burgers are a menu slam dunk. Is that a good thing?
I can’t remember the last time I saw a burger that didn’t have a lacy edge. I know they still exist out there, half-pound bistro burgers oozing with juice, but these are not the burgers that trend, the burgers that beckon obsession on TikTok. No, the burgers I am told I want are meaty doilies, pressed nearly paper thin, ground beef fried to a crisp.
Over the past five years or so, smash burgers have grown in national popularity. But 2024 was the year they officially peaked — and maybe jumped the shark. A genuine creativity around incorporating new flavors into smash burgers has made the inevitable turn into a mandatory menu addition for every place that is trying to be the next big thing. It’s pretty obvious why. Smash burgers are cheap to make and satisfying to eat, as close to a guaranteed win as you can get on a menu. With diners ever stingier with their money, and restaurant margins ever thinner, that’s increasingly the only thing there’s room for.
As Sam Stone writes in Bon Appétit, smash burgers as a forward-thinking trend (rather than as pure Midwest nostalgia from Smashburger and Shake Shack) began in earnest in 2019, with chef Jae Lee’s New York Korean American pop-up that would morph into Nowon. Looking at photos now, Nowon’s smash burger seems positively gargantuan — such height! Is that something resembling a quarter-inch thickness per patty? The present-day smash burger would never.
Every city seems to have its dedicated smash burger pop-ups and counters. In New York, there are chains like 7th Street Burger and Smashed, competing with Greenpoint’s Jubilee Market, Gotham Burger Social Club, and K.O. Burger. In Los Angeles, there are places like Heavy Handed and For the Win, enough that Eater LA writer Mona Holmes declared the city at “peak smash burger” this past year. Las Vegas just welcomed smash burger spot With Love, Always from the owners of a local ice cream shop. And in San Francisco, there are Filipino smash burgers at Bundok’s Burgers and Korean ones at Oh G Burger.
The most prominent proponent of the smash burger is of course Hamburger America, historian George Motz’s ode to the Oklahoma onion burger variant, which opened in New York City in late 2023. The restaurant received two stars from the New York Times, with Wells praising that the burger has been “smashed harder and flatter and longer than chains like Smashburger and 7th Street Burger seem to manage.” Its presence cemented the smash burger as, for the moment, the ultimate expression of “burger.”
But smash burgers aren’t just on the menu at dedicated burger spots. Restaurants with wider focus have made room for the smash burger, or pivoted into smash burgers from other concepts. Brooklyn’s Little Grenjai has become known for its Thai-inflected smash burger, available only during lunch, despite a full menu of Bangkok street food classics like drunken noodles and crab fried rice. Inday All Day added an Indian halal beef smash burger with turmeric pickles and raita to its menu of curries, dosa and chaat, and KJUN, known for its Korean-Cajun fusions like jambalaya with strips of kimchi and gochujang andouille and grits, has a Korean-Cajun smash burger set on its lunch menu. Last year, Mike & Patty’s in Boston launched the smash burger offshoot Up & Down. And in Kansas City, Muni serves smash burger tacos, a TikTok favorite, as part of a Thai-Mexican fusion menu.
Do smashburgers make sense on all these menus? It depends. Many are well done (lol), becoming standout items on diverse menus the way Nowon’s did. But other times, they feel like obvious trend chasing. Maybe the smash burger is an attempt to lure in trepidatious customers, or just have fun with something that’s already popular. But really, smashburger tacos? Burgeritos? It sounds like they just wanted to put a buzzy word on the menu and hope profit followed.
Smashburgers taste good, as anyone who has heard of the Maillard reaction can breathlessly explain. But CSK in Chicago, a former neighborhood restaurant that recently reopened as a smash burger spot, perhaps illuminates why they’ve proliferated. Owner Erik Baylis described CSK to Eater Chicago as a “quick-service, recession-proof spot for anyone from a group of school kids to a family of five.” Smash burgers are the kind of food that appeals to the widest possible group of people (save vegetarians). Kids like them, adults like them, and even though beef prices are high, ground beef is still in the realm of affordable. Plus it’s not like you need that much to make one.
What’s more, beef conveys both luxury and value, whether or not it actually is either. It’s high in calories and protein, and if you only have a limited amount of money to spend, it intuitively seems like the best bang for your buck. At Oh G burger, a bulgogi beef, chicken or Impossible smash burger are all the same price, and at Little Grenjai, a single smash burger is the cheapest item on the menu (except for a side of plain rice). But its affordability always seems like not just a deal, but a treat. This comes from the same animal as steak, that eternal avatar of rich living. Why order the chicken when for the same price — or even cheaper — you can basically get filet mignon?
The ubiquity of the smash burger isn’t the only evidence that both diners and restaurants are more drawn to the familiarly delicious than risking the new. Everywhere serves pizza and spaghetti, riffs on fast food favorites, Caesar salads and fries. A smash burger is just a cheeseburger with more melt and crunch, a staple with all our favorite parts amped up, and yet usually made as cheap as possible. We know it’ll be good, maybe even great, before we even take a bite. And even if it’s not that great, we won’t have wasted a day’s wages on it. So as restaurants recession-proof their menus, we’ll see more of the same, until everyone is so busy serving comfort food classics with nontraditional flavors that we won’t be able to tell them apart. Or just until, like all trends, it’s no longer the guarantee it once was.
