βurgerβusiness

Food & Wine magazine likes to select the “Best New Chefs” each year. BurgerBusiness.com likes to ask, “But can they make a good burger?” This year’s F&W list is another interesting one and burgers—especially house-signature burgers—are fairly well represented given the fine-dining level of most concepts honored. Start with Chef Chris Shepherd’s Underbelly in Houston, [...]

Bobby Flay’s Crunchified Green Chile Burger took the People’s Choice Award at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, dashing the dream of fellow Food Network star Michael Symon to win for a fourth consecutive year. Symon’s entry this year was a Gruyère-topped French Onion Burger. A vanquished Symon tweeted “congrats to my boy @bflay [...]

Earlier this year, BurgerBusiness.com shared data from NPD Group showing that even as the total number of U.S. restaurants declined by 1.1% in 2011, the number of burger restaurants grew. And recently we listed more than three-dozen significant new burger-joint openings in 2012. The burger business keeps growing, and the 13 brands detailed below are [...]

This has been a really good year for burgers if by burgers you mean chicken. From Chicken McBites, Popcorn Chicken and Chicken Dippers to the Mozzarella Chicken Supreme, McBistro Chicken, 20-piece McNuggets and shareable Chicken Box, burgers often seemed consigned to a back seat. McDonald’s new Cheddar Bacon Onion was offered with choice of an [...]

By all rights, 2012 should have been the year the burger business stopped to catch its breath and reassess. Beef prices had skyrocketed. A decade or so of rapid growth had critics expecting a bubble burst for better burgers. Instead, 2012 welcomed a bumper crop of great new burger joints. Included here are more than [...]

[Wisconsin? Well, maybe later. BK has brought back the California Whopper but just in 4 West Coast states. Read details here. It's trying out the King Deals discount program in San Diego. Read here.] Burger King is heading north for the winter. The chain that created the Carolina BBQ Whopper and Texas BBQ Whopper for [...]

Esquire magazine announced its list of the Best New Restaurants of 2012 and there’s refreshing news: Seven, or nearly half, of critic John Mariani’s picks include a burger on their menus. That’s in contrast to Bon Appetit’s list earlier this year that included not a single burger-loving restaurant. Let’s praise the best of the best [...]

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, with a little help from Seattle magazine (which earlier picked its Top 25), selects the Emerald City’s Top 20 Burgers. Where specific burgers were mentioned, they are included below. In some cases, no specialty burger was mentioned, so a tasty-sounding choice was added. Check the menus; surely there’s an idea begging to [...]

Chef Bryant Ng received his classical culinary training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. His menu at The Spice Table in Los Angeles is global and elegant but still informal enough to include a killer burger. That may be one reason he is one of 12 recently named “Best New Chefs for 2012” by Food [...]

Where are the best burgers in America served? Hey, if there were a single, final answer, there wouldn’t be any blogs, and what fun would that be? Delish.com has posted its list of the 25 best burgers and the restaurants that will cook them for you. And sure, I disagree with many of them, which [...]

AOL announced the winners of its City’s Best program, where users vote for their favorite restaurants, bars, theaters, clubs, etc. We’ll skip the rest and home in on the Big Question: Who won Best Burger?             As a resident of the state that elected Rod Blagojevich its governor, twice, I can say with authority that [...]

Brunch is back in vogue. NPD’s research finds brunch sales up 8% through August versus last year. Not much else in foodservice is up 8% this year. Why the increase? Perhaps because brunch is a relatively cost-effective way to get the family together for a meal away from home. Or maybe it’s because burgers have [...]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syOisVda_R0 Sexy ads haven’t reversed its sales slippage. Neither has snickering humor. Now, a frustrated CKE Restaurants wants to make “the facts” the battleground in its competitive war with McDonald’s. Its Carl’s Jr. chain today unveiled a new Big Carl burger, a double-decker sandwich that CKE claims has twice the meat and twice the cheese as McDonald’s [...]

Wendy’s/Arby’s Group waited 24 hours after its annual meeting of stockholders before announcing that its Wendy’s brand needs some serious marketing help. The company’s May 28 post-meeting announcement was the upbeat message that the company is “well-positioned to create value for our stockholders.” On May 29, the tone was more sober: Wendy’s said that as “the [...]

A collateral benefit of build-your-own-burger concepts’ popularity is that operators and diners more clearly understand that a good burger is the sum of its several parts. Beef quality counts, of course, but so do the bun, cheese and condiments.     Spreadable toppings are the language in which most signature burgers are written. The Umami Burger [...]