A Day Making NYC's Most Hyped Burgers at Hamburger America | On The Line | Bon Appétit

- [Narrator] I've been obsessed with burgers

easily for about 25 years now.

Hamburger America is the name of the documentary film

I made in 2004.

I have since then written five books.

I've had three TV shows and now a restaurant.

Two burgers are on the menu are there because I believe

that those are primary source burgers that go back

to the dawn of the hamburger.

There's always that moment before we open the doors.

You know within seconds the place is gonna be filled up.

We're doing 1200 to 1400 pounds of beef a week.

My job is to make people appreciate hamburger history.

My job wasn't really to feed people,

but it just became a natural next step

and I'm glad I took it.

[upbeat music]

Good morning, I'm George Moats Burger Scholar,

and this is Hamburger America.

Come on in.

[upbeat music]

We built the restaurant of my dreams.

I was not trying to do something that's silly and retro,

but based on history, what would an old school diner do?

And we actually made it happen, I can't believe it.

- [Speaker] What are you doing, George?

- I'm trying to fix something, somebody bent.

I don't know, how do you bend these things?

[person laughing]

Owning a restaurant, literally it's every five minutes

something breaks, every five minutes.

This beautiful 11 stool counter was a design

that I've had in my head for decades.

You'll notice it's a very unique setup.

There's a griddle facing forward.

I didn't wanna spend the rest of my life facing a wall

and have everybody say, George, turn around.

I wanna take your picture.

It's 10 o'clock, we gotta get going,

we're open in an hour from now.

Let's get to work, come on,

prep happens downstairs, incoming.

Oh, [beep] you have to make sure we blur out this machine.

So no one saw this, right?

This is proprietary.

Don't have to blur out Antonio, this is Antonio.

[person laughing]

All the burgers have onions and we sell a lot of burgers.

Our onions have to be the perfect thinness

so they cook faster because that's the way

they did it back in the old days.

So this thing is perfect.

That actually slices the onions

exactly the way we need them.

I used to use a deli slicer.

That's 120 to 140 movements like that for one onion.

This thing slices onions in four seconds.

We're now doing 200 pounds of onions a day.

This is the thing I don't miss,

by the way, about doing this.

So for some reason you could slice 20 onions

and be crying like a baby,

and all of a sudden, the 21st onion, you just stop,

your eyes glaze over and your body's protecting itself

against hydrochloric acid

that's coming off of onions.

How do you do it?

[speaking in foreign language]

- Oh, but the real star of the show is the beef.

Check this out.

This is where the meat is hidden.

It's roughly 700, 800 pounds, we have enough.

I think we definitely have enough.

[person laughing]

To my workstation, let's do this.

Two of the most important ingredients right here.

Onions, beef.

We look at the whole restaurant.

We make sure that the entire restaurant

is set up ready to go,

which means that if you're behind the counter,

you can do with this thing.

Let's gathering thing.

You can just put all that together, pull it towards you.

Put our menus back in here.

Ready for the next customer.

Hey Allison, look who's here.

It's our star server Allison,

we have a lot of tools here, they're all necessary.

One is my smash-ula.

In order to smash a burger,

I need my very thick 12 gauge stainless steel.

Couldn't find a spatula that was strong enough to withstand

smashing over and over and over again.

They kept breaking and bending.

So I had a friend of mine made me one.

Once you smash the burger, you need to flip it over.

You end up with a second tool, which is basically a scraper.

We sharpen them 'cause we need

to get the burger off the surface perfectly.

Sometimes we do this in front of customers.

They're like, what's happening?

It's just a sharpening stone, that's sharp.

And then when we're done, we scrape up

all the other stuff on the flat top with this.

So we're getting the seasoning set up.

We have kosher salt

and we have a special seasoned salt.

These are melter covers, this is the butter wheel.

It's big on TikTok.

[person laughing]

We toast our buns with unsalted butter.

Originally we thought we had salted butter

and we had it unsalted and we liked it

so we never changed it.

That's the way things go.

The grill takes a while to heat up.

It's ready to go now,

we usually turn it on about an hour before surface.

It's an old school, one inch thick piece of steel.

We could have chosen like a $35,000 griddle,

but we had to use an old one

because the newer models tend to burn our onions badly.

So we use the old school model that will not burn the onions

unless you really try to.

We gotta open, seriously.

It's 11 o'clock, we gotta work.

And it was definitely a show.

We like to call this hamburger Benihana,

two doubles, too single.

Making an Oklahoma fried onion burger.

I do it the historically accurate way.

People used onions

to extend their beef supply very hard times.

Probably 20 years ago I went out to Oklahoma.

I thought, that's too many onions,

but it's absolutely not too many onions, they cook down.

Smashburger cannot be hand formed.

It has to be a ball or beef.

But I like the effect

and the way the smashburger looks when it starts as a ball.

But I'm just trying to get it so that it's thin enough

that it's not falling apart,

but that it's also cooking fast.

But I was, during popups, I would make one burger.

This burger, the onion burger.

I can tell when it's ready to flip 'cause I can see it.

The edges cook, juices race to the surface.

That's when it's ready to flip.

Cheese goes on on the flip.

You can go anywhere in Oklahoma.

This is the way they're making their onion burgers.

The bun's not even toasted.

You steam the buns on top, the onions cook down.

I mean, they go to less than half their volume

and they change their color completely.

You can see that.

Look at that, it's like optimal.

We have a very unique system here.

This griddle, that sandwich station feed the counter,

the back griddles in the back expo

go out to the dining room and to go.

We have Claudia on fryer, just shoestring fries, that's it.

This is drink expos where all the drinks come from.

We have a couple of special milks in house.

We have obviously the obvious,

the New York chocolate egg cream.

This is a traditional Milwaukee hot ham sandwich right here.

It's basically thin sliced ham,

heated up on the griddle with Swiss cheese.

Another Midwestern staple.

This is the classic right here.

Literally the first burger ever made

was likely a smashburger.

The smashburger was lost at one point

to patty forming machines, to freezing methods.

And we're trying to make sure

that people appreciate that, we're bringing it back.

And what I do is I give it a little bit

of a cooked patch on one side so that when I do smash it,

it doesn't get stuck to the spatula.

People think of smashing a burger.

You lose all the juices, you're smashing a raw patty.

There are no juices, it's all un rendered fat.

Once you cook the bottom half of the burger,

all of the juices are racing to the surface to escape.

And then once you start to see the juices are at the top,

you flip it over to preserve them.

Cheese on, melt.

To me, when I'm looking at the griddle,

it's almost like the way a surfer looks at waves.

Every once in a while I have remind myself

to look up and see who's here.

Oh, hi, see.

[person laughing]

It's season salt.

It's Lawry's, Lawry's season salt.

[person laughing]

You can get as a cheeseburger or no cheese,

or you can get it all the way with very fine diced onion,

mustard and pickle.

We dope it, which means

that we get the bottom half of the bun ready to go.

And that way all we have to do is put the patty

on top of that and we're done, that's it.

Oh, look at that.

That's beautiful, beautiful.

I've always been obsessed with American hamburger.

A long time ago I was looking for

a subject for a documentary.

Somehow nobody was treating

the American hamburger with any respect.

So like a very quirky little film called Hamburger America

and ended up becoming sort of a cult favorite

among some super fans.

And here I am now, 25 years later, standing in front

of a griddle in my own restaurant.

It's a fun job, I mean,

this is the best job I've ever had, I think.

[person laughing]

Good to see you, bud.

Hey, we got a little thing happening here.

[person laughing]

During the pandemic,

I lost 14 events around the world.

George Motz's Burgerfest in Tokyo, Toronto, Paris, London.

It was incredible, and we lost them all

because of the pandemic.

So we were trying to find a way to survive

and we started making burgers in my backyard.

And I built this thing called the burger slide.

Like it was a closet.

It was a part of my closet, my kitchen closet.

I ripped it out, stuck it out my window,

and people would, could come by at like 2:30 for a double

and window would open up at 2:30

and out would come a bag of burgers.

I think if we hadn't done that, I don't know if we could

open this restaurant if I hadn't kept up practice,

positive contact.

I'm gonna make you a very special item here.

I'm not gonna say what it is.

And if you know what it's called, you can order it.

Only need to know about this.

It is the burger of my youth.

I was a lifeguard in my teens and I used

to run down the beach to get this at a different beach club.

I could eat two of these and then run back to the beach.

No condiments on this one.

It's cooked in butter.

It's perfect, it's important to me

because this is my hometown burger.

This burger's been around for 51 years.

This is my last one, but I'm actually gonna let T finish it.

I'm outta here.

- Give it up, bud.

- I do that every day and I love it.

[person laughing]

You ready T, T's got it, T's got it.

I said a long time ago that I'm not an idiot.

I'm not gonna open a restaurant.

I have so much fun just being on TV and writing books.

I mean, why would I wanna open a restaurant?

I'd be stuck in one place and here I am.

Dream come true, it's a dream come true.

Absolutely a dream come true.