Good Burgers

An allegory about hamburger nuance

A belated Merry Christmas, blessed St. Stephen’s Day, joyous Kwanzaa, happy Boxing Day and best wishes to anyone celebrating anything today. To everyone else, happy Friday. If you’re new around here, you should know that I get weird around the holidays. Which will become apparent momentarily. Bon appétit!

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I am the chef in a hamburger restaurant. A specialist, really. Hamburgers and french fries, that’s it. They’re delicious.

I knew I wanted to cook hamburgers from a young age. I studied hamburgery throughout school, eventually graduating a chef. I know a lot about burgers.

The restaurant hasn’t made me rich, but it’s a nice spot and people gladly pay for good burgers. It’s been this way for years, although the equation began to change about a decade ago thanks to Hamburgergram.

Almost overnight, everybody started making hamburgers and sharing their hamburgers online. Everywhere you go, people are out in public eating hamburgers and posting about it. People who began cooking last year are all over my socials, explaining about hamburger nuance.

On YouTube, hamburger charlatans have sprung up like weeds. They offer endless streams of advice about which grills sear the best, which pans heat up fastest, which pickles make burgers great. Many of them sell pre-packaged secret spice blends. Everybody’s sure the right spice will fix bland burgers.

I’m as surprised as anybody that green curry has become the hottest thing in hamburger seasoning this year, but you can’t argue with trends. I like a curry burger as much as the next guy, but I can’t help but feel let down that so few people remain interested in the traditional flavors that long made hamburgers such beloved American food.

You like what you like, I suppose. Make your burgers how you see fit. Hopefully others will like the taste, too.

A trend has been growing, for years, right under my nose. Along with home chefs making hamburgers for friends and family, a lot of them have turned burger prep into a side hustle. More than a hobby but less than a job, they make some pocket money and have fun doing it. Good for them, I suppose. And if everybody’s more interested in burgers, how could that be a bad thing?

Several semi-pro burger restaurants have begun popping up all over town. Suddenly when you google “burgers near me” my restaurant isn’t even on the first page. Places that opened up yesterday are getting all the clicks, even if their burgers are dry and overcooked. Better to be good at social media, it seems. Now chewy, well done burgers are in. I am told that hamburger making evolves and I guess this is what evolution looks like. So now I’ve got to start overcooking my burgers, too.

When the first hobbyist restaurant opened up down the block I shrugged it off. But now there are more, and they all sell $1 combo meals. It’s causing some customers to ask why my cheeseburgers are $5. They’ve always been $5, I tell them, but now it seems I’m overpriced. Even if my burgers are better, it’s hard to compete with even a passable burger at one-tenth the price.

These hobby restaurants are run by people with day jobs so they don’t need to be very profitable. They’re just having fun, after all, so if they can pick up a little cash on the side, what’s the harm?

Hobby restaurants are up and down my block now. One place is even doing a promotion — “Dime Days” — where on Thursdays you can get a hamburger with no condiments for ten cents. There’s a line out the door! And on Thursdays I can’t sell a burger to anyone, even at half off.

I think my burgers taste better, but I get it. Their burgers are fine. Sometimes they’re even pretty darn good. And at such a low price, can you blame the customers?

To lower my prices I’d have to cut corners — no more premium beef, no more dry aging, no more brioche buns — but I don’t want to do that. I know what a good burger tastes like, and I know what it takes to make it. I have to find customers who can taste the difference and are willing to pay for it.

There have never been more burgers made than there are today. So why do they seem less valuable than ever? I guess when there’s a burger shop on every corner, it just isn’t special any more.

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As if we hamburger chefs need another challenge, now everybody’s saying AI is going to make impossibly good pseudo-burgers and soon nobody will want the real thing. I’m not convinced, but maybe it’s just because I really love real burgers. Everything I’ve tasted has been more like a veggie burger. I have nothing against veggie burgers, but they don’t taste like the real thing. Still, the big brains say we’re cooked. If they start giving away AI burgers for a penny, will anybody care? I guess if you’re hungry enough all that matters is the protein.

I’m not sure what to make of all this. I think there will always be some people willing to pay for a quality burger. But how many? And will they pay 100 times the cost of a suitable facsimile? This seems like a real problem. We hamburger chefs will have to make some changes, adapt and overcome. But I’m not sure what that looks like.

The worst part is that I really like hamburgers. I’ve spent my life studying them, cooking them, eating them, talking about them… and now I’m supposed to accept that they’re just not special any more, that they’re going to go away entirely? Nobody will pay for good burgers any more? It’s all a bit difficult to comprehend.

I could learn to cook chicken. Grilled, baked, fried… Lots of ways to make tasty chicken, right? People seem to like it. And the audience is growing. How different could it be?

Still… I like hamburgers. I value them. I think they’re special. And I get a little sad remembering when everybody else did too.

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