A Day Making NYC's Most Hyped Burgers at Hamburger America | On The Line | Bon Appétit

I've been easily obsessed with

burgers

for about 25 years. Hamburguesa América is the name of the documentary I made in 2004. Since then I have written five books. I've had three television shows and now a restaurant. Two

burgers

that are on the menu are there because I believe they are primary origin burgers dating back to the dawn of the burger. There is always that moment before opening the doors. You know that in a matter of seconds the place will be full. We are

making

1200 to 1400. pound of meat a week my job is to get people to appreciate the history of

hamburger

s my job wasn't really to beat people down but it became the natural next step and I'm glad I took it good morning.

I'm the George Moes Burger scholar and this is Burger America, come on, let's build the restaurant of my dreams. I wasn't trying to do something silly and retro, but based on history, what would an old school restaurant do? And we really made it happen. I can't believe it, what are you doing? doing George, I'm trying to fix something that someone bent, I don't know how these things are done, owning a restaurant literally it's every 5 minutes something breaks every 5 minutes, this beautiful 11 ​​stool counter was a design that had in my head for decades, you'll notice it's a unique setup, there's an iron facing forward.

I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in front of a wall and have everyone say George, turn around, I want to take your picture, it's 10:00. we have to go, we will be open in an hour, let's get to work, come on, the preparation happens downstairs, incoming, oh, we have to make sure we delete this machine so no one sees this right, this is proprietary, it doesn't have to be deleted Antonio, This is Antonio, all

hamburger

s have onions and we sell a lot of hamburgers. Our onions have to be the perfect thinness so they cook faster because that's how they did it in the old days, so this thing is perfect and it actually cuts the onions. exactly how we need them.

I used to use a gelatin cutter that makes 120 to 140 strokes like this for an onion. This thing cuts onions in 4 seconds. Now we make 200 pounds of onions a day. This is what I don't miss. By the way, by doing this, for some reason you could cut 20 onions and cry like a baby and suddenly, with the 21st onion, your eyes glaze over and your body protects itself against the hydrochloric acid coming out of the onions. How do you do it? Oh, but the real star of the show is the meat. Look at this. This is where the meat is hidden.

It weighs approximately 700,800 pounds. We have enough. I think we definitely have enough for my workstation. Let's make these two of the

most

. important ingredients here onions beef we look at the whole restaurant we make sure the whole restaurant is ready to go which means if you're behind the counter you can do with this Gather things you can just put them all back together throw it towards you to through our menus, come back here ready for the next customer, hey Allison, look who's here, it's our star server, Allison, we have a lot of tools here, they are all necessary, one is my smashula so I can smash a burger.

I need my very thick 12 gauge stainless steel, I couldn't find a spatula that was strong enough to withstand, you know, smashing over and over again, they kept breaking and bending, so I had a friend of mine, one, one time you smash the hamburger. to flip it you end up with a second tool which is basically a scraper, we sharpen them because we need to get the burger off the surface perfectly sometimes we do this in front of customers and they say what's going on? Just a whetstone that is sharp. and then when we're done, we scrape all the other things off the flat top with this to prepare the seasoning, we have kosher salt and we have a special seasoned salt, here are the melter lids, this is the butter wheel, it's big . at Tik top we toast our buns with unsalted butter originally we thought we had salted butter and we had it unsalted and we liked it so we never changed it that's how things go the grill takes a little while to heat up and you're ready to go function.

We usually turn it on about an hour before the service. It's an old school 1 inch thick piece of steel. We could have chosen like a 35,000 iron, but we had to use an old one because the newer models tend to burn our onions a lot, so we used the old one. school model that won't burn the onions unless you really try we really have to open it's 11:00 we have to work it definitely was a sight we like to call this burger Benihana two doubles two singles we're

making

an Oklahoma fried onion burger Lo I do it in the historically accurate way that people used onions to extend their meat supply during difficult times, probably 20 years ago.

I went to Oklahoma. I thought there were too many onions, but they don't cook too many. The Smash burger cannot be formed by hand. It has to be a meat ball but I like the effect and the way the Smash Burger looks when it starts out as a ball but I'm just trying to get it thin enough so it doesn't fall apart and also cooks quickly when I was doing popups. I would make a burger, this burger, the onion burger. I can tell when it's ready to flip, so I can see the edges, the cooking juices run to the surface, that's when it's ready to flip, the cheese continues to flip.

They can go anywhere in Oklahoma, that's how they make their onion burger buns, they're not even steam toasted, the buns on top of the onions are slow cooked, I mean they get to less than half their volume and they change their color completely. Look, look at that. like Optimal, we have a unique system here, this griddle, that sandwich station feeds the counter, the back plates in the back. Expo comes out to the dining room and to go we have Cloud in the fryer, just potato chips in strips, that's it, this is the drink. Expo is where all the drinks come from our house, we have a couple of specialty milks, but obviously we have the obvious: the New York chocolate egg cream, this is a traditional Milwaukee hot ham sandwich, here it's basically ham in thin slices heated on the griddle with Swiss cheese, another from the Midwest. staple, this is the classic here, literally the first burger ever made was probably a Smash Burger.

The Smash Burger was lost at one point due to Patty forming machines for freezing methods and we are trying to make sure people appreciate bringing it back and what I do is give it a little cooked patch on one side to so that when you crush it it does not stick to the spatula. People think that when you smash a burger you lose all the juice, you are smashing a raw burger. there are no juices it's all unsqueezed fat once you cook the bottom half of the burger all the juices run to the top to escape and then once you start to see the juices are on the top you give it the turn to preserve them as cheese. melting when i look at the plank is al

most

like the way a surfer looks at the waves every once in a while i have to remind myself to look up and see who's here oh hi look it's seasoned salt it's low in salt, little salt, you can get it as a burger with cheese or without cheese or you can get it completely with very fine DIC onion mustard and pickles, we dope it which means we have the bottom half of the bun ready to go and that way all we have What to do is put the Patty on top of that and we're done that's it oh look it's beautiful beautiful I've always been obsessed with the American hamburger a long time ago I was looking for a subject for a documentary somehow no one was covering the American hamburger With all due respect , I made a very quirky little movie called Burger America and it ended up becoming a cult favorite among some super fans and here I am now, 25 years later, standing in front of a griddle in my own restaurant, it's a fun job.

I mean, this is the best job I've ever had. Good to see you buddy, hey, something happened here during the pandemic. I lost 14 events around the world. George Mod's Burger Fest in Tokyo, uh, Toronto, Paris, London, was amazing. and we lost them all because of the pandemic so we were trying to find a way to survive and we started making burgers in my backyard and I built this thing called The Burger slide like it was a CL, it was part of my closet, the closet from my kitchen. I ripped it out, stuck it out my window and people could come at 230 for a double room and the window would open at 230 and a bag of hamburgers would come.

I think if we hadn't done that, I don't know if we could open this restaurant if I hadn't continued practicing positive contact. I am going to prepare a very special article for you here. I'm not going to say what it is and if you know what it's called you can order everything. I need to know about this. It's the burger of my youth. I was a lifeguard in my teens and used to run down the beach to get her at a different beach club. I could eat two of these and then run back to the beach without condiments. this one is cooked in butter it's perfect it's important to me because this is my hometown burger this burger has been around for 51 years this is the last one but I'm actually going to let him finish it I'm leaving here leave it I do that every day I love it you're ready T I got it I got it I said a long time ago I'm not an idiot I'm not going to open a restaurant I have a lot of fun just being on TV and you know and I write books why I would open a restaurant I would be stuck in one place and here I am, a dream come true, a dream come true, absolutely a dream come true.