“A big part of what makes the Big Mac appealing in pictures,” a burger aficionado I know mused the other day, “is that the patties extend past the perimeter of the bun. But then you actually get one, and most of the time you can barely even see the patties.” We were sitting outside Smashed NYC, a new burger shop on the Lower East Side. He peeled back the black-and-white checkered wax paper folded around the Big Schmacc, a highlight of the menu. Two thin jagged-edged disks of deeply browned ground beef hung floppily over the limits of three halves of Martin’s “Big Marty’s” sesame roll; there was clear visual evidence, too, of sharp-cornered, barely melted slices of American cheese, shredded iceberg lettuce, crinkle-cut pickle coins, and Creamsicle-colored Smash Sauce. “This is what it’s supposed to look like,” he explained, with the authority of a biologist.
I confess that I’ve never tried a Big Mac—because I’ve seen what it looks like in real life. (It’s better not to gaze directly upon the beef, which tends to take on a gray tone.) But I imagine that the Big Schmacc is also what the Big Mac—which McDonald’s introduced in the hope of attracting adult customers, and once advertised as “a meal disguised as a sandwich”—is supposed to taste like: a sandwich carefully layered to provide a uniform, balanced medley of charred, smoky fat, mellow cream, gentle tang, crunch, salt, and just a hint of sweetness in every bite. Unlike at McDonald’s, where the burgers are precooked and reheated, at Smashed your burger is made to order, pressed flat and seared on an extremely hot griddle until it becomes a marvel of the Maillard reaction, umami sparks flying as amino acids and reducing sugars collide, coalescing into a crunchy golden crust. According to one legend, the smash burger, a relic of Americana from which Smashed takes its name, was invented by an employee of a Kentucky burger stand called Dairy Cheer, who discovered that heaving a five-pound can of beans onto a ball of ground beef on the grill yielded maximum flavor.
Countless words have been spilled in arguments for and against the city’s “best” burgers. The other day on Twitter, Folu Akinkuotu, the writer of Unsnackable, a popular e-mail newsletter about international snacks, perfectly articulated a thought I’ve often had, if more vaguely. “Sausage is like cheese,” she wrote, weighing in on a debate about whether chorizo is king. “There are no true superlatives just perfect choices for different situations.” This also applies, in my opinion, to burgers (not to mention pizza). I would never make the case that any smash burger is inherently superior to, say, any eight-ounce, dry-aged-short-rib burger cooked medium rare and topped with Gruyère on brioche, but I would contend that a smash burger—and, indeed, a Smashed burger—is the best to eat in New York right now.
That a single smash burger patty is relatively light, favoring surface area over heft, makes it palatable even in summer heat, and well suited for transport: you could eat one while walking down a slowly reawakening city street, catching up on a year’s worth of people-watching, or bring a dozen to a picnic. At Smashed, to-go orders are packed extra conveniently, in sturdy cardboard boxes with handles.
You can make the burger even lighter by opting for the vegan iteration, featuring Impossible Burger, Follow Your Heart cheese, eggless mayo, and a dairy-free bun, which I like just as much as the beef version. (The McDonald’s-style fries are also modifiable, cooked in a choice of beef fat or peanut oil.) You can also go heavier, by doubling (à la the Big Schmacc) or even tripling patties, or by ordering the lusciously messy blue-cheese-and-bacon burger, in which case I’d recommend eating in—or eating out, as it were, in Smashed’s Plexiglas-walled parking-space pavilion. Plenty of perfect choices, for different situations. (Burgers $8-$17.) ♦
