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Smashburger
Smashburger is a Denver original in the most literal sense: the chain was founded here in 2007 by Rick Schaden, a former owner of Quiznos, and Tom Ryan, a food scientist who had previously helped develop Pizza Hut's stuffed crust pizza and served as chief concept officer at McDonald's. The pair bought an existing Denver restaurant to test cooking and management techniques before opening the first official Smashburger in June 2007, backed by $15 million in outside capital and a genuinely research-heavy process that reportedly included a blind taste test of roughly 300 kinds of beef before settling on Angus. The name describes the technique exactly: a ball of fresh beef pressed hard onto a hot flat-top grill, searing the surface into a crisp, caramelized crust in a matter of minutes, a method the founders helped popularize nationally well before "smashburger" became the generic term it is today for the entire style. Ryan and Schaden's research-driven approach — treating burger development more like food science than short-order cooking — was unusual for a fast-casual chain at the time and became a big part of the brand's early identity. The bet paid off fast: Forbes named Smashburger to its "America's Most Promising Company" list in 2011, and again in 2014, as the chain expanded well beyond its original home market into a national and eventually international footprint. That growth hasn't erased its roots — the company still operates several Denver locations, including a longtime spot on East 35th Avenue, keeping the smash technique available in the city where two Denver entrepreneurs first built it into a business. For a Denver cheeseburger list, Smashburger is the essential "the format itself started here" entry — a thin, hard-smashed patty from the fast-casual chain that helped take the smashburger technique from a diner trick to a national category, launched in Denver in 2007 and still serving out of the city that built it.
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The Cherry Cricket
The Cherry Cricket has occupied the corner of 2nd and University in Cherry Creek since 1945, when it opened as Mary Zimmerman's Bar. Lloyd Page bought the place in 1950 and gave it the name that's stuck ever since, and the marquee sign he put up — still glowing over the sidewalk today — has become one of the most recognizable landmarks in a neighborhood that's otherwise filled with upscale shopping and condo towers built up around it. That contrast is a big part of the Cricket's identity: it's long described itself as the "black sheep of Cherry Creek," a genuinely divey, unpretentious bar that never got remodeled into something glossier as the surrounding blocks did. The burger is built for choice rather than a single fixed recipe — a hand-formed patty customers dress from a long list of toppings, from green chile and grilled onions to fried eggs and jalapeños, so that regulars tend to have a specific, personal build they order every time rather than a single "house" version everyone gets. National attention has followed the local reputation rather than the other way around: Food Network's Aaron Sanchez called his burger there "the best thing I ever ate," and Travel Channel's Man v. Food singled the Cricket out as one of the best burger joints in the country. The bar took a real hit when a kitchen fire closed it the night before Thanksgiving in 2016, but it reopened five months later with its character intact, and has since grown carefully to a handful of additional metro-area locations without losing the original Cherry Creek room's rough edges. For a Denver cheeseburger list, the Cherry Cricket is the essential "this is the one everyone already knows" entry — an 80-year-old dive bar burger, built to order from a genuinely long topping list, that's held its reputation through a fire, a neighborhood's total transformation around it, and decades of newer competition trying to take its place.
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