The New Yorker:

With a new restaurant, Hamburger America, the burger scholar George Motz engages with history rather than trends.

By Helen Rosner

As with pizza, barbecue, and other archetypal American foods, there’s no shortage of strong opinions about what constitutes a proper burger, but George Motz has earned a right to his opinion more than most. Arguably our foremost scholar of hamburgers and their history, Motz has made documentaries, hosted television shows, and authored several books about burgers, and has even taught a hamburger seminar at N.Y.U. So when he announced, last year, that he would be opening a burger joint of his own, New York’s center of hamburger gravity shifted—subtly, but perceptibly—toward the red brick building on the corner of MacDougal and Houston where Motz had signed a lease. The restaurant, which opened in November, all kitted out with chrome and Formica, is a retro fantasia bearing the same grand, unifying, hand-on-heart name as his first film, and his first book: Hamburger America.

“Like a haiku, the best burgers benefit from an imposed limitation of form,” he wrote in his “Great American Burger Book.” Motz believes in beefiness as a hamburger’s foundational attribute, something to which all other elements—the bun; a sauce, perhaps; a considered minimality of toppings—ought to work in dedicated service. There are just two burgers on the menu at Hamburger America. The Classic Smash, in which a baseball of freshly ground beef is smeared into lace-edged flatness on a searing hot flat-top griddle, can be ordered with melty American cheese or “all the way,” with diced onion, a few dill pickle rounds, and a slash of mustard. The signature George Motz’s Fried Onion Burger uses an Oklahoma technique of covering the beef with a heap of sweet onions sliced paper-thin, and smashing the onion-topped meat into the griddle. After the burger is flipped, the onions caramelize and char between the meat and the griddle, all but disappearing, while giving the patty a haunting sweetness. It’s served with no condiments, no dressings—just a slice of American cheese, as both lubrication and salt, and two salutatory pickle rounds on the side.

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