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7th Street Burger
7th Street Burger opened its first location at 91 East 7th Street in the East Village in June 2021, and it's fair to say it kicked off New York's current smashburger boom more or less single-handedly. The format is deliberately narrow: there are only four things on the menu — a cheeseburger, a double cheeseburger, an Impossible burger, and fries — which lets the kitchen focus entirely on technique rather than variety. That technique is the whole draw. Roughly chopped onions get pressed directly into the beef patty as it's smashed onto the griddle with a spatula, producing something with the crisped, lacy edges of a diner slider rather than the thick, juicy profile of a classic bar burger. It comes topped with sweet grilled onions, a single pickle slice, and a house sauce, served on a squishy potato roll — greasy in the specifically good way that's become the calling card of the smashburger style nationally. Co-founder Kevin Rezvani has described the ambition behind the format directly: the goal, in his words, is to become "the In-N-Out of the East Coast" — an explicit statement of intent that the chain's rapid expansion to nearly twenty locations across New York, Washington D.C., and beyond has been taking seriously. The format matches the food: there's no seating inside the original location, and the handful of outdoor tables are usually taken, so eating standing on the sidewalk is the default experience rather than an inconvenience. It's open until 3am on weekends, which has made it as much a late-night East Village fixture as a lunch spot — the kind of place that catches bar traffic as much as regular meal service. The original East Village location's stripped-down, stand-and-eat format has become something of a template for the wider smashburger wave it helped kick off nationally — a lot of the smashburger spots that opened in its wake, in New York and beyond, borrowed directly from its four-item-menu, no-seating approach rather than trying to build a fuller restaurant experience around the format. That influence is part of why food writers treat 7th Street Burger as a genuine inflection point in New York's burger scene rather than just one good smashburger option among several, even as competitors have multiplied since its 2021 opening. Since that 2021 opening, 7th Street Burger has expanded to multiple locations and become a genuine reference point in food writing about New York's smashburger scene, frequently cited as the spot that made smash technique mainstream in the city the way it had already become across the rest of the country. For a New York cheeseburger list, it's the essential thin-patty, smash-style entry — the technical and stylistic opposite of Peter Luger's thick, dry-aged lunch burger a few miles away in Brooklyn, and proof that the city's burger scene has room for both extremes at once.
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Corner Bistro
Corner Bistro has occupied the same creaky, three-story building at the corner of West 4th Street and Jane Street in Greenwich Village's West Village since 1961, making it one of the longest-running burger destinations in New York City. Over more than six decades it's built a reputation less through reinvention than through sheer consistency — it's the kind of place regulars talk about like they personally discovered it, even though it's been ranked at or near the top of nearly every "best burgers in NYC" list for years. The signature order is the Bistro Burger: an eight-ounce beef patty, cooked on a cast iron griddle, topped with cheese, bacon, and onions, and tucked into a soft potato bun. It's a genuinely tall, messy burger — closer to a classic dive-bar build than a smash burger's thin-and-crispy profile — and it's served in a genuinely no-frills setting: cash only, minimal decor, cheap beer, and a bar-first atmosphere that makes clear this is a neighborhood bar that happens to serve one of the city's best burgers, not a burger restaurant with a full bar attached. That combination — landmark reputation plus a resolutely unpretentious space — is a big part of the draw. Lines out the door aren't unusual, especially on weekend nights, and the wait has become part of the ritual for a lot of regulars rather than a deterrent. Part burger landmark, part neighborhood institution, Corner Bistro has resisted the upscaling that's changed a lot of its West Village neighbors over sixty-plus years, keeping prices low and the format essentially unchanged since Kennedy was in office. The West Village itself has changed dramatically around Corner Bistro over sixty-plus years — rising rents and rapid turnover have reshaped most of the surrounding blocks multiple times over — which makes the bar's unchanged format and pricing a genuine anomaly rather than a marketing angle. Regulars describe the appeal in almost identical terms across decades of reviews: the burger is bigger and greasier than the low price suggests it should be, the beer is cheap, and nobody who works there is trying to sell you on anything beyond exactly what's already on the small chalkboard menu. The bar's fame has its own backlash, too — a single 1977 New York Times write-up turned the Bistro Burger into a bona fide tourist attraction almost overnight, and some regulars and food writers have since argued the hour-long weekend wait isn't worth it anymore, with a few going as far as preferring Shake Shack's more consistent version instead. Corner Bistro itself hasn't budged in response to either the hype or the backlash, which reads as either stubbornness or confidence depending on who's asking. For a New York City cheeseburger list, Corner Bistro is the classic-format anchor: no smash technique, no dry-aged beef program, just a thick, well-charred patty in a dive bar that's been perfecting the same order since 1961. It's the kind of place that shows up on nearly every serious New York burger list not because it's doing anything unusual, but because "consistently excellent for sixty years" turns out to be a genuinely rare thing to pull off.
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