The Play-Doh of Meats

The quest to perfect the American burger.

BY BENJAMIN WALLACE

Grills were being wheeled onto patios, cookouts prematurely envisioned, National Hamburger Month just days away. For the Burgerati, the high season of the hamburger was nigh, and the group had come together in late April for a conclave at the Ox-Cart Tavern, a gastropub in D­itmas Park. Many of them had first met over Instagram, where leering, close-up photographs of hamburgers are a pornographic currency. Four of the Burger Babez, an all-female monthly burger club, were in attendance. Brad Garoon, who blogs as Burger Weekly, sat beside Ammar Shallal ofBurgerator, a global burger-rating mobile app. Three of the people at the table were from Burger Lift, a start-up that manufactures stainless-steel trivets for individual hamburgers.

They had been summoned by David “Rev” Ciancio, founder of the blogBurger Conquest, full-time hamburger marketer for butcher Schweid & Sons, and “the mayor of New York burgers,” according to Shallal. The hamburger, among this group, was less a conversation topic than a filter for making sense of the universe. Ciancio discussed the logistics of the American beef-supply chain. Someone else noted the apparently well-known density of burger bloggers in Melbourne, and Shallal offered his own insights into global burger obsession: Based on Burgerator’s 8,500Instagram followers, the current hot spots are the Middle East, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil (especially São Paulo), and Scandinavia. There was competitive talk of burger-eating frequency. “Last Friday, I had 15 burgers between noon and 5 p.m.,” Ciancio said, preempting any response. More esoteric tangents included the vocabulary challenges burger bloggers face. “There’s only like ten adjectives to describe burgers,” Ciancio said. Garoon revealed that last year, when he was writing an ebook calledBurger City, he found that he’d used the word delicious 78 times; he changed a bunch of them to different words, such as transcendent.

Ciancio had called the chef at Ox-Cart  “a bit of a burger nerd,” and the burgers there skewed chef-y, like La Vaca, which comes topped with a fried chipotle pepper, pico de gallo, and Oaxaca cheese. When the burgers arrived at the table, the Burger Lifters all placed their Burger Lifts (low, round, grated pedestals) under the burgers on their plates, as did Ciancio, who’d removed his from a small Ziploc bag he carries with him wherever he goes. “It protects your burger from the tyranny of soggy buns,” Ciancio said. Last year, Burger Lift raised $11,000 on Kickstarter, and Mercer Kitchen now serves its burgers on Burger Lifts. “So brilliant,” Gabrielle Novick, a Burger Babe, said. “You guys should be on Shark Tank.”