It's ambition bordering on hubris how a new crop of Manhattan restaurants is reinventing the hamburger. Stand, with its custom-made BDDW furniture, and Brgr, with its Rockwell Group design, each cost over $1 million to open, and you can't help but think that somewhere there's a PowerPoint presentation outlining how they'll change grabbing lunch the way the W Hotels changed business trips. Chef Laurent Tourondel, meanwhile, opened BLT Burger around the same time he snipped the ribbon at a branch of BLT Steak at the Ritz-Carlton in San Juan, Puerto Rico. But there's more to these places than just branding. The hamburgers at Stand, Brgr, and BLT Burger — typically dressed in the buns and paper wrappings you might expect from In-N-Out Burger — are delicious, exceptionally so, and it starts with the meat.
Most backyard-barbecue burgers are made with nothing but ground chuck. So are most restaurant hamburgers, though some steak houses might use sirloin and brag about it on the menu. But Stand's proprietary blend includes brisket, BLT Burger's incorporates flat iron, and Brgr's combines as many as four different classified cuts of beef. So when I went to the Spotted Pig on an unusually bright afternoon, it was to taste the boneless short rib in the burger. Even though I couldn't pull apart the flavors, halfway through lunch I felt something of the ecstasy of St. Bartholomew, patron of butchers: the overwhelming beefy joy of the perfect hamburger. For that I was grateful — not only for the skills of chef April Bloomfield, but for a man named Pat LaFrieda.
If you haven't heard of LaFrieda, it may be because you don't own one of Manhattan's better restaurants. He's the third Pat LaFrieda to work at LaFrieda Wholesale Meats (his father, Pat LaFrieda, Jr., still runs the day shift), the supplier for Babbo, Momofuku, BLT Steak, A Voce, the Union Square Cafe, and another 200 establishments. He also grinds the meat for the city's most celebrated hamburgers: Stand, BLT Burger, Shake Shack, and the Spotted Pig all use custom LaFrieda blends that start with chuck and then might (or might not) include sirloin, brisket, boneless short rib, shank, skirt, flat iron, and even hanger. (Brgr's hamburger is ground in Montana.) Each blend is a closely guarded secret, tailored to the techniques and demands of a particular restaurant: Will it be a thin or thick patty? Griddle or grill? Medium or high heat?
For Shake Shack (thick patty, griddle, high heat), there's a high percentage of brisket; for Stand (thick patty, griddle, medium high heat), it's sirloin; for BLT Burger (thin patty, griddle, high heat), there's that flat iron; for the Spotted Pig (thick patty, char-grill, high heat), it's boneless short rib. And maybe some other cuts the chefs don't want to reveal. There's no simple, scientific relationship between fat content and heat: Each cut has a distinct flavor profile, and all respond differently in the hands of each chef.
