We've Reached Peak Smashburger
It's the new craft beer
Broadly speaking, each edition of This is a Newsletter! is a whip-around the cultural landscape that is kind of digressive in ways that are personal or just extra loopy. This can segue into decently granular culinary rants about hanging out with self-professed foodies, the best way to order orange dipping sauce as a semi-idiot, and a wholehearted embrace of hating on chopped sandwiches. I could talk about the ways in which thefoodfreakk types have made it easier for amateur home cooks to understand what they’re cooking, and how that kind of content-heavy short-form online tutorials have paradoxically raised the bar in what most people are willing to eat. But I will address the most glaring public exception to this, which is the confoundingly, frustratingly wack oversaturation of smashburgers, which may be the natural result of the oversaturation of TikTok foodies. No true gourmand would call themselves a “foodie,” because it is truly the most mirthless hobby: I love eating food that tastes good! Only in America.
I should run a brief meta-address of the fun and fatuity of this kind of hyperbolic conversation, but if you live in any kind of urban area, I would assume you’re familiar with every burger morphing into an overpriced smashburger. It all feels kind of abstract and wrong. If you see pimento cheese on the menu, I mean, you better fucking run. The majesty of sufficiently bad food pics and restaurant review videos has led to the majesty of food items being priced at insultingly high rates.
All in all, this is jarring: A cheeseburger will start at $10, every extra patty is $4, every topping is $2, and it will be slathered with something called Badass Bussin’ Bendejo Sauce—which is essentially thousand island. For fries, your only option is parmesan truffle fries which are an additional $8.50 and they will be in a metal cup for some reason. The fries are hand-cut in-house, which translates to somehow burnt AND soggy at the same time. If you want to dip your fries in something, your only options will be spicy ketchup or garlic aioli. A regular can of Coke will be $5. At least they have an entire wall devoted to fridges full of only IPAs that start at $17 a can and taste like pinesol and cat piss. But the labels are so pretty.
And while you wait for your overpriced meal, you’ll overhear a conversation from one of these every-so-common hipsters—and I hate saying hipster because I sound like a 2014 old head—even though this archetype lost its charm back in 2006. That it’s still so dominant indicts all of civilization. Anyways this gentrified soy boy will be dressed to the nine in a Mac DeMarco-ass fit with cuffed Carhartt pants and a tiny beanie that barely fits on their head, and they will have a mustache and thigh tattoo. They’ll be speaking with another carbon copy of him in the most insufferable tone about his freelance graphic design gig, his buddy “Roscoe,” and how much they love this new ambient noise album. It will seem like fiction because of how hilariously cliché it is and you will realize these “alternative lifestyle” characters are some of the biggest conformists imaginable.
This type of place will dress itself up like a hip, gourmet restaurant, but they mostly serve middling food to the type of person who pretends to enjoy natural wine and scented candles. It’s pretty much a given, and a meme at this point, that these restaurants will always have stools that have no back instead of chairs, and the sound they make when they drag against the concrete floor. How do you make a worse version of a monobloc 50 years after the fact? But we shouldn’t overlook the black surgical gloves, man bun, beard, and tattoos. Oh, and your burger will be served on a metal tray with wax newspaper as the mat, the ductwork is exposed in the ceiling, and the bathroom urinals are kegs cut up and repurposed. A place like that is guaranteed to have a neon sign by the entrance that says “Spread My Buns” or some shit for the selfie culture. It should be part of zoning law that mandates any restaurant that has one of those neon “EAT” signs in the dining area to have a matching one in the bathroom that says “SHIT.”
And then they end up shutting down while blaming the community for not supporting a “small business.”
'a Mac DeMarco-ass fit with cuffed Carhartt pants and a tiny beanie' is one of the best reads of their aesthetic. I saw a queue of these men in Soho London, waiting for a smash from a place literally called 'Junk Burger'.
What I thought was of note, was that Junk actually comes to the UK via Paris. Which then reminded me of the cultural shift that Euro-Disney brought upon European psyche; where they are no longer the global colonisers (aka curators of culture), and the undeniable influence of the American Dream™ on the continent.
From Boston. Can confirm. Please do a follow-up: Smash Burger Now Open for Jazz/Mardi Gras/Soul-Ska-Jazz/Bachelorette Party BRUNCH! Try the Bellini Burger!