Thin burgers are more than the sum of their parts. We didn’t dissect these, picking at unripe tomato, looking at meat grind, seeking a medium doneness. This genre works as a cohesive whole and you judge it that way. We were looking for that magic amalgam of juicy, caramelized meat, melty cheese, soft bun, and the proper balance of toppings. This is your typical drive-in or better fast-food burger. These three outshone the rest:
1. Smashburger
96.00 points
St. Anthony, Golden Valley, and Roseville, mysmashburger.com
The highest-scoring burger in our survey, this Colorado-based chain hit the Cities with a bang in May and delivered in one of the toughest genres of burgerdom: the thin burger. How it manages to produce pink meat and impressive caramelization, all on a nicely toasted egg bun, we don’t know. We imagine the one-side cooking method is part of the formula. (And perhaps white-hot platinum and diamond-tipped braziers.) We hit Smash as our fourth and final burger of the day, at the peak of cranky bloatedness, and actually went back to order another couple at a point where we usually were looking for a cold compress and a swig of Ipecac. We liked the signature Twin Cities Burger, with melty Swiss, Cheddar, and grilled onion (96.33!). The half-pounders were no slouch either. Smashburger’s modern fast-foodie interior with blasting rock music doesn’t invite lingering—they beat it, you eat it, you beat it.
2. Culver’s
93.67 points
Multiple metro locations, culvers.com
The apotheosis of the commendable fast-food burger, Culver’s surrounds the exurbs as if purely to sustain us on our trips to the cabin. The staff of seniors and teens dotes on you, doling out samples and smiles—this is Wisconsin hospitality on a bun. Culver’s Double Deluxe is a miracle, from the moist, beefy meat’s crispy edges, to the perfect balance of toppings and compact eatability. Most of our gang eats our Culver’s in the car, and we all find the eat-in ambiance plastic.
3. Lions Tap
84.33 points
16180 Flying Cloud Drive, Eden Prairie, 952-934-5299, lionstap.com
Lions, a piney roadhouse near Flying Cloud Airport, still makes an excellent thin burger, but it is not quite top-tier in the current competitive landscape. Our team split on these, with March, a Lions regular, rating the double California burger at 89, while Platt found the thing laughably unwieldy, good but not great, and rated it 78. The plusses were good seasoning, juicy, juicy, juicy, a perfect bun, and an authentic ambiance more suited to burger scarfing than the fast-fooders we ranked 1 and 2. The downsides: criminally bad tomatoes, Miracle Whip–type dressing (why?), and no hint of grill caramelization.
Where are the Sliders?
Yes, they are cute. Super cute. We thought long and hard about this white-hot category of burgerdom, but our conclusion is that their diminutive size lends them to overcooking and a general lack of the qualities that make great burgers great. The one exception is Cafe Lurçat’s delectable little babies, but we made no exceptions. |
Building the Perfect Burger
MEAT/FAT
Fat, ewwww. Well, not from an eater’s perspective. Overly lean burgers are dry and mealy, and rapidly become overcooked. Twenty percent fat seems to be the minimum ratio. Ninety percent lean? Get real, and have a piece of chicken. THE CUTS
The average home-cooked burger is typically ground chuck, not the beefiest part of the animal. Higher-end burger palaces are incorporating other cuts into their grind to develop a complex, meatier essence. Our beefiest burgers came from Murray’s and the Parasole restaurants, which are clearly incorporating steak cuts into the grind. THE PROVENANCE
From a food safety standpoint, a restaurant must know where its meat is ground and inspect the source regularly. We enjoy the minerally tang of the grass-fed burgers that have infiltrated the local dining scene, and grass-fed is clearly less of an environmental nightmare. But we don’t agree that grass-fed burgers are inherently better tasting. SEASONING
Salt and pepper are essential to proper flavor. Under-seasoned burgers taste bland. COOKING
Most burgers are cooked on a flat-top griddle, though more and more high-end restaurants cook theirs over charcoal or some other type of grill. Both produce a caramelization of the meat, though people have different tolerances for that char. A lack of it, though, means that delectably crispy exterior is missing. BUN
We were partial to potato flour buns. Size matters, as does moisture content and resilience. Too much of any is a problem; too little is worse. LETTUCE
We liked burgers with shredded lettuce, particularly iceberg, because it doesn’t go soft and it provides some textural contrast. Leaf lettuce (Boston et al.) makes things look pretty but frequently slips out of the burger as you bite and adds no texture. TOMATO
Not too thick, and it’s gotta be ripe. Otherwise, don’t bother. Not that anyone’s listening. SIZE
We ate some great burgers in every size. There is no perfect weight, only what you feel like right that second. |
The Kobe Scam
Go ahead, treat yourself . . . to a rip-off. American Wagyu beef, of which local Kobe burgers are made, can be spectacular in steak form (though only at its highest grades), worth top dollar and boasting an unctuous marbling that will knock you off your heavily cushioned seat. Once that beef is ground, though, it becomes just hamburger with a lot of fat. Put more fat into ground chuck and it gets cheaper. Yet Kobe burgers get more expensive. We could find no discernible upside to them, either in flavor or texture, and we often found them badly mishandled by the restaurants that persist in offering them. Kobe burgers exist to pad a restaurant’s bottom line, period. (The one exception was The Bulldog NE, where all the burgers are Kobe but the prices aren’t particularly inflated.) Don’t be talked into the “affordable luxury” or the “connoisseur’s burger.” Consider it “rube steak” instead. |
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