Let me take you on a little trip to the halcyon days of 2010. Obama was president. Tom Brady was the best football player to ever live. Gas was under, waaaaaaaaaaaay under, four dollars a gallon. Also, every restaurant served giant dried-out hamburgers covered in millions of toppings for $20. No fries. It was a nightmare.
Time travel over. We’re back in the present, the safe now. Things are different. Tom Brady lost like $50 million betting on crypto, Obama is making Netflix documentaries, and gas is crazy expensive. Fortunately, the thick burgers are gone, and smash burgers are in—beautiful, delicious smashburgers.
Perhaps I have a reader who is living under a rock, or is training to be a monk in a mythical monastery high up in the clouds, or who doesn’t eat meat. For those people, allow me a minute to explain what a smashburger is. A smashburger, besides being great, is a thin patty of ground beef, grilled until the edges are brown and crispy. Depending on the place there might be a slightly medium rare center, but there might not be. Generally, smashburgers are served with chopped raw onions, one or two pickles, cheese, and some sort of special sauce, placed between a soft potato bun. Some places will do ketchup and mustard, but most are even shying away from that. Often they’ll come with fries, but not always. The burger will usually cost you $15-20. At least in Chicago.
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This is clearly different from the Red Robin and Chili’s type burgers of the past. Those burgers were advertised as having huge thick ½ pound patties and were topped with things like four strips of bacon, brie cheese, poblano peppers, chili, and onion rings. Some pulled pork thrown on top for good measure. Eldritch concoctions. You can still get these types of burgers at various spots angling to get on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, but they’re a disappearing beast. The last one I had of that variety was in Louisville in 2023. It cost like $21 and did not come with fries. They got my ass.
Some people might be thinking that smashburgers just sounds like a fancier name for the type of burger you get from a fast-food joint. Incorrect. While McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s all serve their burgers with thin patties of meat, there is a major difference. The first is that the fresh ground beef, in a ball and then is smashed onto a very hot grill. This allows the Maillard reaction to take place, adding a layer of flavor that you don’t get from fast-food beef. The crispy edges are the big differentiator, adding a satisfying crunch to each bite. The other differences generally come in the quality of ingredients. For me, there is no better way to eat a burger.
It's hard to trace the development of the switch from the all-encompassing thick burgers of the late 2000s early 2010s to the sleeker smashburgers of today. Hospitality dot com, everyone’s favorite website, says that smashburgers were first invented in Kentucky sometime in the mid-1900s, by Bill Culvertson at his Dairy Cheer restaurant. Other websites agree on this. They were a regional thing for a long time until In-and-Out and Smashburger began popularizing them in the late 2000s. It wouldn’t be until around 2015-ish though that they truly exploded. Now they’re everywhere.
Food trends come and go of course. Remember when shishito peppers were everywhere? Or when Siracha first came onto the scene? Garlic aioli had its moment as well. Kale? Hell, if you go back in time far enough, sugar and pepper were once European food fads. Some of these trends just come from big media pushes, corporate marketing folks trying to break into new areas. Some are more “natural,” whatever that means in this context, actual consumer demand driving the ubiquity of this stuff. Smashburgers seem to be a bit of both. Certainly, the CEOs of Smashburger, Shake Shack, and In-and-Out are enjoying the popularity of the trend, but consumers seem to enjoy them as well. Especially in Chicago, where people line up around the block to get Au Cheval’s or Longman & Eagle’s smashburger. Hell, people are buying flattop grills so they can make smashburgers at home. Seems like it’s a little more than a trend.
There’s also an interesting correlation between the rise of minimalist design/fashion trends in the 2020s and the growth in popularity of the smashburger. I swear I’m not just bullshitting about this. Modern “cool” home décor is all about neutral colors, minimal color pops, and few if any patterns. Go to any home décor/fashion Instagram account or look at Kim Kardashian’s house and you’ll see what I mean. Everything is a subtle earth tone. Very minimalist. Compare this to the fashion and trends of the early 2000s/late 2010s which were all about bright colors, patterns, “going-out tops,” throw pillows with like 3 clashing patterns. Very maximalist. The same is true for burgers. The Burgers of the 2000s were the big, bold, giant burgers. Now we have a more minimalist burger for our more minimalist times.
The root of this, of course, is something other than just “trends.” Depending on who you ask they’ll either tell you that politics is downstream of culture or that culture is downstream of politics. Maybe they’ll say that it’s all about the economic base and the design and food trends are all just superstructure. Or, more likely, they’ll just laugh at you and wonder if you’re being serious. Either way, it’s been a question for a long time.
All that stuff is interesting, in its way. That there is a connection between trends in burger consumption and hip interior design is wild. But that’s not the observation that matters from this whole thing. The observation that I think is truly important here, is that a smash burger costs about the same or more than one of those giant thick-fully loaded burgers of the past. A good smashburger today from most places in Chicago will put you back like $20, which was also the price of a southwestern burger from Red Robin that was loaded with carnitas, tortilla strips, tomatillo salsa, and a ¾ lb. burger. So, for the same price, you get like a fourth of the stuff. How that happened is the more important question, to me, than why smashburgers became so popular. Or at least, you’ll get the answer to that second question, if you answer the first. As is usually the case, the best place to look is who stands to benefit from this change. Certainly, it’s not just about making the consumer happy.
Sorry that I went off on a political tangent. I was supposed to just talk about burgers. My bad. You can read this ranking of burger spots in Logan Square if you want to think about meat some more.
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This is the content I am here for, though in my experience the onions are VERY thinly sliced on a mandolin(e) or by hand if you possess superior knife skills, not diced or chopped, but, toMAYto, toMAHto, there is no BAD way to have a Smashburger. Unless you're a patient of my cardiologist, in which case there is no GOOD way to have a Smashburger.
Also, I was a brioche bun guy, but again, poTAYto, poTAHto.
Thanks for bringing back some great memories. I can smell the onions as I type, which is a great way to start a new week.