Two Status Burgers Just Got (a Little) Easier to Order

Famous burgers capture the specific moment when they became widely desired, with their popularity tied to particular places and experiences. Status burgers can also shape a chef’s career by casting other menu items into the shade. Two prominent examples from the 2010s were burgers associated with Angie Mar at the Beatrice Inn and Billy Durney at Red Hook Tavern. Mar’s burger drew intense praise and crowds after its 2013 introduction, and she later bought the Beatrice. Durney’s burger gained momentum after the Tavern opened in 2019 and became a branded essential. Over time, their approaches diverged: Durney kept the burger as an ongoing mainstay, while Mar later limited it to nine per night at Le B. and then removed it entirely.

"There are good reasons no one puts burgers into time capsules. If they could, there'd be few foodstuffs that more accurately oozed the juices of their particular moments. To reference the DB Bistro Moderne foie burger to one who was there or the preeminence of the Shake Shack Shackburger in that prelapsarian moment where getting one required an hour-long wait in Madison Square Park - before these memories, the madeleine crumbles."

"Two of the great status burgers of the twenty-teens belonged to Angie Mar, then at the Beatrice Inn, and Billy Durney at Red Hook Tavern. Both have drawn breathless coverage and stampeding crowds. "The burger is off the charts. I think about it at night," Graydon Carter, then the Beatrice's owner, said of Mar's burger not long after it was introduced in 2013. The rest of Mar's menu was meaty and ambitious, but one imagines she knew the security that a famous burger can provide - before Beatrice, she was sous-chef at April Bloomfield's Spotted Pig."

"In the years since, Mar and Durney took diverging burger journeys. Durney leaned in. The Red Hook Tavern burger has never been limited by anything but available seats and is a mainstay of the menu at not only the original Red Hook Tavern but also its Sag Harbor sibling. Mar leaned out. At Le B., her successor to the Beatrice, she limited the burger to nine per night - one for each bar seat - before removing it from the menu entirely."

""It's a love-hate relationship for sure," she told the New York"

Read at Grub Street