The Burger Dilemma: Why Some Chefs Resist Putting a Burger on the Menu

On a recent Monday night, Portland, Oregon’s Xiao Ye restaurant was packed with diners. On any other evening, you’d see guests sharing plates of the restaurant’s khao soi radiatori pasta, green curry lamb, and mini madeleines — the delicate French cookies — made with glutinous rice flour and masa, seasoned with a palm sugar caramel whipped butter and a sprinkling of savory jalapeno powder. It’s this kind of food, familiar but surprising, technique driven, with influences from America and all over the world, that the restaurant has become known for.

But Monday night happened to be burger night.

Xiao Ye opened in September 2023 to significant acclaim. Reservations were full and guests were excited to try chef Louis Lin’s take on what he called “first generation American food.” Those first three months were busy, then the new year hit. January is a notoriously difficult time for restaurants, and Xiao Ye was feeling the lag. By March, he was looking for anything to bring in new diners. Lin floated the idea of a burger night.

“The first burger we made was kind of ridiculous,” Lin remembers. “It was a jalapeno popper burger that I just breaded and fried a disc of jalapeno popper in Hidden Valley Ranch and put it on a good bun. We ended up selling 40.”

Thus Xiao Ye’s burger night was born. They’ve just celebrated their 12th burger night, a tradition that often packs reservations and attracts new guests. For some of these guests, it seems obvious that Lin should permanently add a burger to the restaurant’s menu. Xiao Ye, and Lin himself, have entered a decades-old debate among chefs: What to do if you have a very, very popular burger on your hands.

Related: 23 Hamburger Recipes to Put on Repeat

It’s a more complicated question than you might think. Burgers are delicious, of course, and offer something familiar on a menu that might be intimidating to guests who are picky or less than adventurous.

But they also lower a restaurant’s per diner check average, muck up the kitchen, and require a ton of work. Many restaurants with complicated, intricately built menus, have become glorified burger joints when diners decide the burger is the thing to get.

2019 F&W Best New Chef Caroline Glover, the chef-owner of Annette Scratch to Table in Aurora, Colorado, saw this first hand during her years as a cook at The Spotted Pig in New York City.

“That whole kitchen was run on burgers,” Glover remembers. “It was wild to me that we had such beautiful food and people still got the other food, but our whole entire kitchen was dictated by the grill and burgers.”

Related: 7 Simple Ways to Make a Better Burger at Home, According to Chefs

Glover never intended to put a burger on her menu, but when COVID-19 hit, she pulled inspiration from Prune, a restaurant she’d loved during her New York years. She developed a similar burger on a house-made English muffin topped with chow chow sauce, a patty of local Wagyu-style beef, plus lettuce and pickles.

“That became our pandemic item,” Glover said. “And then it stayed on the menu because people loved it.”

Then, in late spring of 2024, she decided to pull it off the dinner menu and move it only to happy hour. Guests were disappointed, but the production had become a limiting factor for other dishes on the menu. In addition to requiring significant space to make the English muffins from scratch, it also interrupted service.

“Annette is a tiny kitchen, and we really want people to share everything,” she explains. Unlike many of the restaurant's other dishes, people tend not to share the burger, which creates an expectation that all the entrees should come out at the same time, which is challenging for the kitchen.

Related: You Should Eat Your Burger With a Knife and Fork — I Promise It's Not Weird

At Xiao Ye, Lin has struggled with similar logistics, in addition to price. Although selling burgers brings in new guests, the amount of money each guest spends on burger night is significantly lower than a regular service. That means the restaurant needs to feed many more guests in a night to make the same amount of money, which changes the flow of service as they work to turn tables.

At River Twice, a modern American tasting menu spot in Philadelphia, the eminently popular  “Mother Rucker” burger has become an incentive to bring guests in on Monday nights, traditionally a slower service for restaurants.

River Twice’s burger consists of two quarter pound patties, “fromage Américaine,” pickled onions, and everything mayo on a seeded milk bun. It’s juicy and sloppy, unlike much of their other food, which is restrained and leans into Japanese influence.

“It is a perfect metaphor for the restaurant,” says chef-owner Randy Rucker. “It says that we take our craft seriously but not ourselves.”

Lin feels similarly about their burger nights, which always feature something different.

Related: 23 Hamburger Recipes to Put on Repeat

“It’s a fun thing,” he says. “I love the burgers, but if we were to put a burger on all the time, I think I’d hate the burger, and I don’t want that.” When the burger format gets tired, Lin says they’ll move on to another night. Taco night? Hot dog night? He’s not sure yet. But he’s confident they’ll stick with just one evening a month.

“The story that we're trying to tell is way better told through the rest of our food,” he says. “I don’t want to short change the restaurant and our story."

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