Inventing a Better Burger

Think the hamburger can't be improved? Top chefs around the world now see the burger as the latest test of their culinary ingenuity

By David Kiley and Rachel Z. Arndt

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Innovating on the familiar hamburger is no easy task. But a combination of recessionary times and perhaps fatigue with vertically stacked food, or that which is formed in metal rings before serving, has prompted chefs and restaurateurs to rethink, if not re-imagine, what a hamburger could be or should be.

Take Richard Blais, chef-owner of Flip in Atlanta, who has burgers on his menu ranging from $6.50 for a basic patty with onions, tomato, pickles, and lettuce to $35 for Japanese Kobe beef with seared foie gras and truffle oil. In between, he is offering burgers made with shrimp, lobster, smoked salmon, or even mushrooms (vegetarians like burgers, too—if they aren't made from anything that had a mother). But with a nod to the times, perhaps, he says his average ticket is around $12. And he has funding to open several more Flips around the Southeast.

Blais takes innovation seriously. A finalist on Bravo's Top Chef last season, Blais is a student of molecular gastronomy, cooking with nitrogen and the like. One of his beef burgers is cooked sous-vide, which is French for "under vacuum," and describes food that is cooked inside an airtight plastic bag over a long period at low temperatures. What Blaise brokers in is not so much hamburgers as proteins of any ilk stuck between two buns.

Indeed, the existence of a bun, rather than the existence of meat, is what seems to define a dish as a burger these days. The rest is up to the chef to decide. And the bun is at the core of how the burger was innovated in the first place. The story has been proffered that the true innovator of what we know as the burger today was Charlie Nagreen. The Horton (Wisc.) native claimed that in 1885, while a vendor at the Seymour Fair in Seymour, Wisc., he was selling meatballs in sauce, requiring a fork and plate. But they didn't move so well, the patrons not wild about having to eat with two hands while taking in the exhibits. So, Nagreen, the story goes, started offering the meatballs flattened in a roll. He stuck by his story until his death in 1951.

A "Hamburg-Style" Sandwich

The word "hamburger" comes to us, though, from the late 18th century when harbor cities such as New York, Boston, and London began selling a minced steak that had been spiced and stretched with breadcrumbs as a binder, a recipe said to have started at food stands at the Hamburg, Germany, docks. So, signs went up at stands elsewhere offering meat or steak cooked in the "Hamburg style."

They may have European roots, but hamburgers have become a quintessentially American food. But that hasn't stopped overseas innovation. MOS Burger in Japan serves up a tempura burger made of scallops, shrimp, and squid. And in Australia, some restaurants offer burgers made from kangaroos. Because their methane emissions are much lower than those of cattle, kangaroos are the more environmentally friendly burger meat, some say.

Some places are sticking to the basics, though. Nagreen may have claimed he served the first hamburger, but Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Conn., begs to differ. The restaurant's hamburger is the same as it was in 1900: a patty topped with cheese, tomato, and onion served between two slices of white bread. Ketchup and mustard are still off-limits.

As hamburger has become the rage, from a resurgent McDonald's (MCD) business in the past twelve months to fine dining rooms in New York and Las Vegas, and a new string of burger restaurants from celebrity chef Bobby Flay, the conversation with chefs and eatery owners on the burger can get as messy as a Big Mac in the hands of a five-year-old. "The thing you have to realize is that chefs are usually burger fanatics," says Flay, whose four Bobby's Burger Palaces opened this year in New York and New Jersey, with more on the way. "When we go out after a tough shift, we go for burgers, and so we have a lot of opinions about how to do it right."

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