How A Michelin-Starred Chef Makes The Perfect Burger

So it's a snowy, wintry day in Midtown. I'm on 51st Street. I'm here at Salvation Burger, which is April Bloomfield's brand new hamburger-specific restaurant. April got her start in New York about 10 years ago at the Spotted Pig, and it's been argued that she won a Michelin star based on the short rib hamburger that she sells there. She went on to create New York's most beloved lamb burger at the Breslin, and now she's opened a spot which is dedicated to hamburgers. This really is a soup to nuts burger. I mean, you have controlled every aspect of what ends up on the plate, right? Totally every aspect, from finding the farm where the steer's been grazing, to going to visit the slaughterhouse, and then hiring a fantastic butcher, Jocelyn Guest, to grind the meat for us in-house. So I've been dreaming about this project for a long, long time, at least six to seven years, of being able to control my own blend and just have direct contact right there. If there's a problem or I wanna do something on the fly, I have somebody there that's just as passionate as me that can kind of get us a great product. These are all of our New York strips and ribeyes right in here. So the one that Erica's cutting up right now is a wheat dry-aged, so it gets a beefier flavor, a little funkier, all the flavors condense and becomes a lot more tender. So we just grind that up and put it straight into a burger. And then you can see right here, this is the leg. But basically what we do is we're doing a completely whole animal blend. So it's something that nowhere else in the city is really doing. Every burger has every part of the animal in it. You know, one day it might be really fatty, one day it might kinda not have the same consistency that you're looking for, but when you're taking care of all of that on the back end, then, you know, like April can say, okay, I want it more fatty, I want it less fatty, you know, depending on the season, the flavors are gonna change a little bit. So that kind of tweaking can just be really exciting, especially for someone like April who really cares. Tell us about the cooking process itself, because that is quite unique also. Yeah, you know, it's been a couple of dreams of mine has been to be able to cook over wood. And, you know, the wood's gonna impart a teeny, teeny bit of flavor, which is, you know, perfect for this type of burger. So check this out. This is the aged, a little bit of aged beef tallow. Oh, lovely, okay. That we've got here. So you're gonna get some of that flavor in there too. Yeah, we're gonna get a little bit, anything to kind of layer that flavor, you know. Yeah, this one I'm gonna show you is a little French onion style. Okay. It's just some caramelized onions with a little, actually, and it's just the perfect burger, I mean, really. Look at that, that is amazing, thank you. Look at this thing. So this is the namesake dish, this is the Salvation Burger. And, I mean, it looks, I love the primal aspect of this hamburger, it's really just cheese, onions, beef, and bun, what else do you need? Here I go. Oh my God, okay, wow. You get that beefy, steak-like flavor, a bit of smokiness. The onions have this sort of thyme flavor. The cheese adds this creamy, viscous blend to everything. But the meat itself is really hearty, like it tastes like short rib or like a steak. I'm going in again. Mm. And that bun, it's got like this quadruple layer of crunch. There's a crunch on that, then you have the tenderness, the airiness of the inside of the bread. Then you have the snap and crunch of the maillard reaction on the burger itself. Then you have the juicy innards, and then it's all repeated again on the bottom. It's just, this is a great, great hamburger. So, I'm impressed. I mean, I knew I would be. April is a incredible chef, and she's obviously put a decade of burger knowledge and expertise into this thing. I think that she's knocked it out of the park. This is what The Salvation Burger should be. There's nothing quite like a full English breakfast, whether it be fuel for a hard day of labor, a comforting meal to ward off a dreary day, or a cure for an epic hangover. The meal is a celebration of breakfast. It is breakfast as feast. In New York, British chef, April Bloomfield, is reforming the way that people feel about English food. And in my opinion, she's serving up one of the best versions of the breakfast anywhere on Earth.