By Leila Molitor.
The smashburger was originally a humble act of Depression-era physics. It was the "utilitarian" choice for people who needed a meal in five minutes and had six cents in their pocket. For decades, it lived where it belonged: in greasy-spoon diners and the kind of roadside joints where the cook didn't know your name and certainly didn't care about your "content." In New York, it was our birthright. You went to a corner spot, watched a guy in a stained apron press a ball of beef into a screaming hot griddle with a heavy spatula, and walked out with a lacy-edged, salty miracle on a Martin’s potato roll. It was fast, it was ugly, and it was perfect.
The shift began when the "burger nerds" decided that the thick, $30 dry-aged bistro burger, the kind you needed a steak knife and a nap to finish was officially over. Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack had already laid the groundwork, but the real acceleration happened in the late 2010s through the "pop-up" circuit. Mike Puma and the Gotham Burger Social Club took a hobby and turned it into a high-stakes scavenger hunt. Suddenly, if you weren't tracking a specific Instagram account to find out which brewery in Gowanus was hosting a "limited drop" of patties, you weren't eating the "right" burger. The unintentional creators were the purists, the guys like George Motz who actually cared about the Maillard reaction and regional history. They meant well, but they accidentally gave the internet a new religion.
The moment it went off the rails was 2022, when the algorithm realized that the sight of a heavy metal press crushing beef into a sizzling griddle was the culinary equivalent of "satisfying" slime videos. Virality warped the smashburger from a cooking technique into an aesthetic. Places like 7th Street Burger and various "Wagyu" collaborators realized that if you make the shop look like a minimalist spaceship and the line wrap around the block, people will wait forty minutes for a four-ounce patty just to film the grease dripping onto the sidewalk. The media detonated it, crowning a new "Best Burger in NYC" every Tuesday until the words lost all meaning.
The NYC "ugh" reaction hit its fever pitch when the "smash" became an excuse for mediocrity. Every bar in the five boroughs suddenly replaced their menu with a $19 "Signature Smash" that was really just a dry, burnt disc of commodity beef served by a bartender who was too busy making espresso martinis to clean the flat-top. The cultural fallout is a city saturated with copy-paste storefronts where the lighting is better than the seasoning. We’ve reached peak "Burger Fatigue," where the simple joy of a cheeseburger has been replaced by the logistical nightmare of a "drop" and the visual clutter of a thousand phone screens held at eye level.
We used to just want lunch. Now, we’re forced to participate in a hype cycle that treats ground beef like a Supreme release. The grit is gone, replaced by a polished, influencer-friendly version of "authenticity" that costs three times what it should and tastes like a desperate need for validation.
So who ruined it? George Motz made it. Grub Street detonated it. TikTok worshipped it. And the rest of us? We were just trying to get to work without stepping over people photographing a squashed patty on a yellow napkin in the middle of the East Village.
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