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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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Shake Shack (Madison Square Park)
Shake Shack's very first location started as something much smaller than a restaurant: a hot dog cart set up in Madison Square Park in 2001 to support the Madison Square Park Conservancy's first public art installation. Restaurateur and park benefactor Danny Meyer ran the cart as a genuine experiment, and it worked — Shack fans lined up daily for three consecutive summers, which was enough proof of concept to justify something permanent. That permanent version opened in 2004: a small ivy-covered kiosk at the southern end of the park, across from the Flatiron Building, designed by architecture firm SITE as a deliberate riff on the classic American hamburger stands of the 1950s and '60s. The ShackBurger — a 100% Angus beef patty, raised without antibiotics or added hormones — was the anchor of the menu from day one, and it's remained essentially unchanged as the chain's signature order through everything that's followed. What's followed is a genuinely remarkable scale-up: from that single park kiosk, Shake Shack has grown to more than 350 locations across 32 U.S. states and multiple countries, becoming one of the most recognized "better burger" fast-casual brands in the world. Through all of that growth, the original Madison Square Park kiosk has stayed in operation and kept its status as the location regulars and tourists alike treat as the pilgrimage site — the place to eat a ShackBurger if you're only going to eat one, purely for the sake of having done it at the source. Danny Meyer's broader hospitality philosophy, developed across his other New York restaurants, shows up even at the original park kiosk despite the fast-casual format — an emphasis on genuine ingredient quality and customer experience that helped distinguish Shake Shack from typical fast food from day one, and that's carried through the company's massive subsequent expansion. The Madison Square Park location in particular draws a steady mix of office workers on lunch break, tourists checking a landmark off a list, and burger enthusiasts specifically visiting to eat at the original site rather than a more convenient branch closer to home. The park setting is part of the experience in a way no other Shake Shack location can replicate: eating a ShackBurger on a bench in Madison Square Park, with the Flatiron Building visible across the street, is a genuinely different occasion than eating the same burger at a mall food court location, even though the food itself is built to be identical everywhere. For a New York cheeseburger list, it's the essential "where it all started" entry — proof that a hot dog cart built to support a park art installation turned into one of the most successful burger expansions in American fast-casual history.
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