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White Manna
White Manna opened in 1946 in Hackensack, New Jersey, housed in a small prefabricated diner structure originally built for the 1939 New York World's Fair, and its tiny footprint has kept the format essentially unchanged for nearly eight decades, with a small horseshoe counter surrounding the cook's station. The restaurant is widely credited as one of the originating locations of the "smashburger" technique, in which a ball of ground beef is aggressively smashed flat against a hot griddle, producing a thin, heavily caramelized crust that's become the defining format behind the broader smashburger trend that swept fast-casual burger chains nationally in the 2010s and 2020s. Chefs and food writers have repeatedly cited White Manna specifically as an influential reference point in that broader smashburger revival, with several nationally known chefs crediting a visit to the small New Jersey diner as directly shaping their own restaurants' approach to the technique. White Manna's combination of its original 1939 World's Fair prefab structure and its foundational role in the smashburger technique that later swept the national fast-casual burger industry has made it one of the most influential small burger counters in the entire country, despite its tiny size and low national name recognition.
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Five Guys
Five Guys was founded in 1986 in Arlington, Virginia, by Jerry and Janie Murrell, who named the restaurant after their five sons, all of whom worked in the family business as it grew from a single location into a regional chain before beginning national franchise expansion in 2003. The chain built its identity around a deliberately simple, no-frills approach — a short menu of burgers and fries with free toppings and no shakes or specialty sauces beyond basic condiments — along with a policy of serving fries in a paper bag with visibly overflowing extra portions, a small but consistently mentioned detail in customer reviews. Five Guys' fries are cooked exclusively in peanut oil, a sourcing choice the company has maintained company-wide despite peanut allergy concerns, and the chain has built a reputation for displaying bags of potatoes by state of origin directly in-store, a transparency-focused marketing touch few competitors have replicated. Five Guys's combination of its family-founding story, a deliberately simple and consistent menu, and its distinctive peanut-oil fries has made it one of the most recognized names in the "better burger" fast-casual category that emerged and scaled rapidly through the 2000s and 2010s.
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