Everyone Thought It Was the Ultimate Answer for a Great Burger. Everyone Was Very Wrong.

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I had a burger recently that blew my mind. Miraculously, it was at a Lebanese restaurant. Thick, grilled to temperature like a steak (I prefer my burgers medium), made with 20 percent lamb and 80 percent beef, and featuring white cheddar, jammy caramelized onions, lettuce, tomato, and a burger sauce that’s made with Lebanese toum and Worcestershire. The burger dripped with wonderful juices and popped with a lovely, grassy beef flavor. What is this taste? I wondered to myself.

It was in that instant that I realized two things: One, the flavor that had so captivated me was just a hefty patty of good beef, and two, I had been inhaling far too many smashburgers as of late. Those burgers, smooshed to oblivion and grilled into darkness, don’t give off the same alluring beef aroma. They don’t have the same wonderful, signature beefy taste. On that day, mouth full of meat, I decided to forswear simpering smashies and eat more pub burgers. “Thick burgers are back,” I declared to no one but myself.

“You can just taste the beef more,” says Samy Eid, owner of the aforementioned Lebanese restaurant, Phoenicia. He’s also the founder of Chickpea Hospitality, a restaurant group in southeast Michigan responsible for some of the region’s finest restaurants. About a block away from Phoenicia is this cool, artful little steakhouse-bistro hybrid called Wilder’s. It’s got all the Americana-specific steakhouse fare—immaculate cuts of meat, shrimp cocktail, oysters, and a big, beefy wagyu cheeseburger weighing in at half a pound.

The Wilder’s burger is equally excellent, but getting there was a creative struggle within the team. “Do we put a smashburger on the menu or go with a pub burger?” recalls Matthew Hollander, managing partner of Chickpea. Eventually, the team settled on a thick burger, because it better fits the steakhouse vibe and also because, as Hollander tells it, a smashburger is an “outside burger,” and a thicker pub burger is more of a luxurious, time-consuming sit-down experience.

Look, I realize the virtues of smashburgers. They’re … accessible. The patties, smashed and cooked on a flattop, achieve a crispy, caramelized crust that melds in totality with the other ingredients. The cheese, the bun, the pickles, the ground beef —it all fuses impeccably. The result is a melty, gooey burger experience in which all flavors become one. Texturally, smashburgers can be nice. It’s possible to understand why they have ascended into burger dominance over the past five years: the eye-popping wow factor of a made-for-Instagram sloppy smash, the portability, and the price (smash ingredients are typically cheap). But in that time, thick burgers have become too distant in our minds. It’s almost as if, collectively, we’ve all forgotten about the classic. The pendulum has swung too far! But now, thankfully, chefs and food writers appear to be dragging it back.

“It’s a steak on a bun,” waxes Jeff Strauss, owner of Oy Bar and Jeff’s Table in Los Angeles, of a classic pub burger. Strauss is a sandwich aficionado, a longtime Angeleno who can get down with a smashburger—but even he admits his heart lies with pub burgers. “You get meatiness, you get juiciness, you get the other side of beef that we react to, which is that juicy, iron-rich, full flavor,” says Strauss. “It’s also great as a platform for flavor, which is what I always look for: platforms for flavors and textures. Things to create a memory experience.”

Strauss hypothesizes that food critics in Los Angeles (the types of people covering dining trends for Eater, the Infatuation, and the L.A. Times) might be becoming sick of smashburgers for what he calls their “lack of range.” “If you look at these lists of the best burgers in the city,” he says, “you see a lot of pub burgers now. [Like] what’s happening in L.A. at Dunsmoor, The Benjamin, at Dudley Market, at Moo’s Craft [Barbecue].”

When Strauss says the word range, he’s referring to the things that a pub burger can do that a smashburger just can’t, and one of those is to hold a lot of toppings, to become that “platform.” Strauss’ Oyburger (which you can get at Oy Bar in Sherman Oaks) includes toma cheese, Persian cucumber, hoisin ketchup, red onion, Little Gem lettuce, Dijon, and cilantro—this beast is stacked with condiments. It’s a tribute to the Taiwanese beef roll popularized outside its native community by the legendary food critic Jonathan Gold. “I remember when I first read about it, I drove deep into the San Gabriel Valley to try that thing,” recalls Strauss. In keeping with that passion, his burger is a love letter to Los Angeles, the city’s multiculturalism, and the way foods seamlessly intersect with one another. Could a smashburger carry such riches? He thinks not.

“If I’m eating a burger on the go, I’m getting a smashburger,” Strauss says, which brings me to another point in favor of pub burgers: the uninterrupted art of eating well. There’s just something sensual and meditative about sitting down with a big, beefy two-hander, a kind of focus, clarity, and peace. It’s the feeling of eating that we crave too. I mean, it is sort of impossible to be scrolling mindlessly on your phone when your hands are dripping in beef juices, right?

To be sure I wasn’t missing something in my growing penchant for pub, I talked to Matthew McIvor, the guy behind one of the more enticing smashburgers in L.A. County, on the shores of Redondo Beach at Proudly Serving. “I like to blend my love of pub burgers and smashburgers together,” McIvor teases. He started slinging burgers in his Redondo Beach backyard during the pandemic. Now? He’s thinking about franchising. Customers flock from all over to Redondo and Hermosa Beach just for his double-patty smashburgers (no paltry singles here).

But McIvor doesn’t just serve original smashburgers with American cheese, pickles, onions, and special sauce. Proudly Serving doles out plenty of burger specials, including a steak Diane burger, a birria smashburger, a pastrami burger, a house-made chili burger, and a brunch burger with egg yolk and bacon jam. Every month, there’s something different. Still, for all his creativity, he acknowledges that most smashburger places don’t experiment that much. “They have maybe one burger on the menu, then you get to add patties,” he says. “I just don’t have that mentality. I have to have variety.”

To McIvor’s mind, adding all the accoutrement you typically associate with a fancy pub burger doesn’t hinder the smash at all. Personally, I am skeptical that much of the beef shines in a smashed 2-to-3-ounce patty with all those inventive toppings. Those big quarter-to-half-pound burgers you find at places like Wilder’s and Oy Bar? The beef flavor is pronounced because it’s thickset and cooked medium. Strauss’ phrase steak on a bun keeps ringing in my ears.

I ask McIvor straight up if it’s possible to grill a smashburger to temperature, and he says no. Getting all of those full, beef-forward, grassy, buttery flavors is just more difficult when it’s been smashed into an overcooked disc of can-we-even-call-this-beef-anymore?

Another thread I’ve found among chefs is that the ones who focus on butchery (and thus full meaty flavor) tend to lean toward pub burgers too. “I like a pub/tavern-style burger a lot more than a smashburger,” says Blake Shailes of Butchr Bar, a Los Angeles restaurant specializing in butchered salumi, offal, and Australian wagyu. “The smashburger is in full swing in Australia now,” Shailes says. “I personally think there is a time and place for both. Cheap burgers can be a smash style that have that great flavor and texture from the Maillard effect and the caramelization of the meat as a cheaper cost point. However, a thicker patty has a larger cost point. I like the fact you get a different texture from the meat that has caramelization and still has that medium-rare/medium fleshiness. We cook our burger over charcoal at Butchr Bar that gives a unique flavor and texture to a patty.”

Shailes raises a good point: Cheap burger meat can be smashed to mask its inherent mediocrity. It’s a nifty trick that keeps price points rather low, even for a double smash. But just because many smashburger joints use cheap meat, that doesn’t mean that everyone is. Goldburger in L.A. and Melway Burgers in Detroit both serve their smashburgers with meat that comes from regenerative farms, and both serve flavorful, scented, beefy burgers. However, grass-fed meat is usually leaner, making it more difficult to achieve those “lacy” edges that nerdy smashburger champions clamor for.

Instead of continuing dully on with the smashburger trend, more and more chefs are turning to pub burgers because it suits their creativity and belief systems, and guess what? Burgers are better for it. They’ve become more flavorful, experimental, and true to an immersive dining experience that we should all be seeking out. Smashburgers, with their inherent repeatability across the medium, have become stale and uniform. I can’t help but revisit once more Jeff Strauss’ thesis: It’s a steak on a bun. That special feeling that a steak conjures, its particular exclusiveness, and the way it seemingly locks you into a specific place and time. I’m more inclined to see my burgers as steaks now, and order them for their bold flavor, excellent quality, and sit-down experience. And, hey, it’s cheaper than a steak too. So indulge in a big burger at a restaurant. Stay a while, and sit with your food. This, friends, is dining well.