Nick DiGiovanni - I Ate The World's Best Burger

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

I can't believe it tasted like that... Thanks to all the restaurants that we featured in the video!

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This is the number one rated burger in the entire world, and we're going to be comparing it to this futuristic burger made by a robot, this Wagyu burger from the best beef in Japan, and everything in between, and we're starting here where the first ever hamburger was invented. This is Lewis's lunch, the world's first burger restaurant established in 1895. They serve their burgers the same way they always have, and ketchup and mustard are not allowed. You ready to try the country's first hamburger? I'll tell you a story. One day, back in 1900, a gentleman ran into this exact restaurant and told the owner here, was in a hurry and wanted something quick. So the chef threw ground steak trimmings

between two slices of toast, since it was the fastest thing he could make. And the rest is history. Thank you. You're welcome. What you're looking at here is an exact copy of the first hamburger ever made. It looks a bit more like a sandwich than a modern day hamburger,

but it also looks a lot juicier. It's classic. It's the most pure form of a hamburger that I think I've ever had. But with that said, we got a lot of burgers to try. So let's go. Okay. Our next stop is Gordon Ramsey Burger, where they serve a beautiful breakfast burger.

Perfect to start our day. Out. So I got the burger out tempering. I always want to temper you a meat before you start to grill it. This is our SPG seasoning. The salt, black pepper and granulated garlic. You want to cover the whole thing. Of course, you want to get both sides.

I really want one of these for my house. Super consistent. It's wicked fast. The crazy thing is I don't make enough burgers, but I'd still want one. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to flip it. We're going to go into another nice hot spot of the grill. So we get consistent sears on it. And people don't realize the grill marks have so much flavor.

They're not just for looks. It just adds to that nice fatiness of the burger. It just cuts right through everything. Look how much smoke is coming off of the burger. This is one of the biggest vent hoods I've ever seen. Should I flip it again? What I have even cooked consistently on both sides. This is the egg.

This goes just a little bit of salt. I'll shake it around a little bit. But as you see, you get a little brown on the edges. But other than that, we just kind of let it do this thing. It's coming from a hot pan. So as it sits, especially an egg or any proteins, they're going to continue to cook for a little bit. What you want to do is you really want to base the burger with this butter.

We got a little bit of poison, fermented black bean sauce, honey, garlic. And what that's going to do is going to stop to calmize a little bit. That's what give you a lot of that flavor that makes this burger really special. I personally like my burgers almost cooked a little bit like a steak because that's sort of what it is. It's the same beef just in a different form. I love that you can just see such a clear crust on this burger. Like Chapchetta, sort of like Lincoln Logs on the top.

And we're going to put in the salamane. It's going to get a nice crisp on that bacon. It's going to melt that cheese. Oh. You can see it start to crisp up. Beautiful. It's going on a brioche bun. Let me get our egg.

As you can see it kind of carried over right there. And it's just in time for breakfast. Gordon really never ceases to amaze me with his food. He's taken something almost very simple and made it into a masterpiece that I want to dive into. This isn't just a burger I eat for breakfast. I need this one all day long. Next up is Hamburger America, a restaurant that serves burgers from all across the country, but they're best known for their onion burger.

This place was founded by George, who's dedicated his entire life to studying burgers from all over the world, and is now known as America's number one burger expert. What do you like in a burger yourself? What do you think makes the perfect burger? To me, a perfect burger is simple. People like to put crazy crap on top, like, you know, truffle oils and mac and cheese, and it just doesn't do anything.

The original burger had nothing more than beef and a bun, not even cheese. Cheese is a wonderful addition to a cheeseburger. So the onion burger invented El Rino, Oklahoma, in 1922, meat, salt, super thin sliced onion. Wow, that's awesome. This is what the French call Chevoudonges. Chevoudonchevou d'ou d'ouchevou d'ouche,

which basically means Angel's hair. That's twice the amount of onion I would have expected you to put on either. But they cook down. They cook down to less than half of their volume. Traditionally, before there were paddy makers and paddy formers, there was a portion ball of beef that was smashed thin. That was it. Because when they realized early on, the thinner the paddy,

the faster they cook. Simple as that. I love how focused you are. You got to get up close, make sure everything's perfect. You have to own this. You have to be part of what's the process. You're not just throwing frozen patties on a flat top. You're creating, you know, basically burger art.

This is actually a paint scraper. A paint scraper? It's a stainless steel paint scraper, yeah. So it really is. is art. So that gets the bun nice and steamed and warm over there. Exactly. So the school of thought that says the bun should be toasted. Yeah. We do have a burger with the word the bun is toasted, but this burger, I believe has to be steamed. In order to keep it traditional to the Oklahoma onion fried burger, I think it has to be steamed. Also, the closer they are together, the better it cooks. If I have the grill of full, it cooks much better than just one burger. The key to this burger is just time. This burger takes about eight minutes to cook. Our regular smash burger will take no more than like two minutes. Shhh, out it goes. But getting those onions sort of lightly caramelized takes a little time.

The weird science that's going on here now is that the onions are on the bottom. The reddered beef fat is now going down into the onions and cooking it. It's also helping to slow down the process and caramelize those onions. You see how it's shrinking? The rendered beef fat tallow is really

what turns these onions into that beautiful caramelized, almost like onion candy. Look at the difference. Add it to a taste different too. This comes off like this. We do a pinch and pull. A little underneath move, you like that? It's wrapped up.

Oh, gosh. That's crazy. Plated it. Look at that. The Oklahoma way is to do a little bit of mustard. That's incredible. Enjoy. This thing's almost sort of melting into my hand, I will say.

This burger is so soft. Yeah. Mmm. You know, I don't even like mustard that much, and it's unbelievable. It's a bit, the flavor profile completely works. The cheese is melted to perfection. It's just perfectly melty right in the middle there. And some people don't believe it.

They sit at the counter, they take their first bite and they go, Oh, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Next, we're heading to the most famous steakhouse in New York City for their dry-aged burger. They turn all of their steak trimmings into incredibly flavorful ground beef patties that we're about to try. Welcome to the vault of Peter Lugar. This is our dry age room.

So this is like the bank vault, but for a steakhouse. Exactly. How much meat is in here? So literal tons. I can't give you an exact estimate. Oh, there are actual tons. Thousands and thousands of pounds. There's different cuts and there's different lengths of age. And once it's been finished aging, then it's ready to do it.

to be butchered in-house. So this is how it looks before it goes into the vault. And this is how it looks after. Mova is going to use the bandsaw to break it down into steaks. And then Fabio here is going to trim the steaks so that they're ready to be cooked in our broilers later. So after they've trimmed down all their steaks, each of which is over an inch and a half thick.

They're left with all these incredible trimmings here, which we're going to grind down into burgers. All right, so those are the trimmings that we just saw. We normally grind about 60 pounds of ground beef on a weekday, 90 pounds on the weekends. So this is our ground beef. It's the blend of a chuck in the dry-age trim. So we measure out the burger meat in a coffee cup.

It's very old school. And then we press them out and shape them into patties. Those are tossed onto the broiler. We season it and while that's cooking, we slice the bun and add a slice of raw onion that's been soaked over in any water. After we flip the paddy, we let it cook a little bit longer, toss on the cheese and the burger is done.

First, I just want you to look at how juicy this burger is. Look at this stripping down on the plate. Oh my God. I would say without question that it's sort of the fullest and meatiest burger that I think I've had. Sometimes a burger can sort of be a snack, but this one right here is a whole meal. And I taste the dry-hage flavor really well, too.

I'm taking this one to go. It's time for a pretzel bun burger. This restaurant is called Emily, and instead of your typical cheeseburger, they're best known for their pretzel bun burger. It all starts with a generous amount of seasoning, and then the patties go on to a flat top grill where they'll sit and get a nice sear on each side. Then, they're placed off to the side to rest, similar to a steak, and they add on some cheddar cheese to let it slowly melt over the top.

The patties are also loaded with a generous amount of caramelized onions, which they cook down for six hours each morning. While these are in the oven to let the cheese fully melt, they butter and toast the pretzel buns, then top them off for the Korean go-chujang sauce. Once the cheese is melted, it's time to assemble, and the burger is ready to go. This burger is really pretty, and it sort of goes to show you that burgers can and should come in all shapes and sizes. And unlike your typical smash burger, this burger here has lots and lots of juice. This will probably be the messiest burger I eat in this entire video, but I don't think. I don't think I'm going to be mad about it.

Wow. Because it's a pretzel bun, it's chewy. It's a little bit sweeter than a regular burger bun, and the orange sauce that they put on here is phenomenal. Look at my hands. I'd eat the whole thing, but I gotta savor them. I've never had one of these in my life, but we had to put it on the list, a mac and cheeseburger.

You heard that right. The Ainsworth is known for its extremely tall and messy Mac and Cheeseburger. Hi, I'm welcome to make a mac and cheeseburger. So you're making two things right now, Hugo. You're making mac and cheese and you're making a burger. Yeah. And then you put it all together. Okay, so first you start by pressing out the patties, yeah?

They're huge patties, by the way. Yes, season it. Just salt? Okay, you season it. Ah, okay, so now the burger's going into the broiler. Is that a mac and cheese patty? Yes. Oh, put it in the fryer.

I start making the cheese sauce, the cream. This is the macaroni already cooked, right? Yes. And it's all portioned out for one burger. Yes, put on the warm water. Macon cheese sauce. Oh, Hugo, do you have anything to say to everybody watching to the camera?

Coming to try the macan cheeseburger. Come and try his burger. Are you sure though? Yes. What if it gets crazy and you have like 100 orders of the burger here one day? That's okay? Yeah, would you like a medium or medium?

What do you suggest? Medium. You're the chef. Medium. Medium? Yes. All right, then we're going medium. Oh, look at that.

Wow. Now the macaroni pasta. Drop it right into the cheese sauce. So it's for cheese. Parmerean cheese, mozzarella cheese, cherry cheese, belvita cheese. Oh, that's how you get it really melty. Yeah, yeah. Got it. Creamy. Now I put on the half, put some little butter and put on the flat top.

Look at that cheese. This is the most cheese I've ever seen in my life. That's medium ready and put it to more sliced cheese. There's cheese everywhere. Ugo, you might as well at this point put a piece of cheese on my head. Special sauce? Yes. Load it all up. Mac and cheese patty goes on. Here comes the burger patty with the cheese on there. Wow. And then it's finished off with this mac and cheese, which is just crazy. Mac and cheese everywhere. Oh, look at that. Knife goes in.

I think we forgot to add the cheese. No. This thing is too big to fit in my mouth, so Hugo is going to cut it in half and check out the cross section of this burger. Come back, Hugo, come on. I'll take a bite, okay? The seasoning is amazing. I actually thought it would be too much cheese with all the mac and cheese, but it's actually really tasty, huh? Yeah. Thanks, Hugo. Can I take this to go? Can I take this to Yes. We're about to try a vegan burger made by a robot. This is Colonel, a robot-run restaurant founded Steve Ells, the same guy who founded Chipotle. You're the first person I've ever meeting who has a teammate that's a robot.

That's right. Yeah. Never calls out, never gets sick. That's amazing. So this is sort of a little cube where all the food is made. Yeah. So how do we get the robot to make a veggie burger? So let's place an order now on the app.

This is the menu here. I'd like to order a few burgers. So Colonel Burger and add a couple to the bag. and place the order. So these are essentially the nests in the oven. So it's like the sort of dashboard. In a restaurant right on the line, the chef has to keep all this in his or her head.

It has all the timing, everything down in its own sort of head here. Everything is orchestrated to be completed at once. So bottom buns go here, top ones go here. So it raises up. And then there's two conveysers there. Oh, that's so cool. Look at those red dots on the buns right there.

It's for all the lasers for the robot to know when to send certain stuff and where it is at all times. You have it so well set up where you can just sort of... Yeah. Everything we've got down to about 15 seconds. So with the robots help, essentially, everything takes 15 seconds once it's here. Yeah.

I actually hear the burger patty sizzling too. Wow, that is so fast. That's not even full speed. No? If we were to crank up the speed, it may like come out of the tray. So these ones are finished. Yep.

And then the robots ready to pick that up. Oh, there it goes. And it's coming here. It's so cool. I'll grab the paddy here. Really nice toasted rioche buns, salsa verde, pickled onions on top. And then this goes all the way down this conveyor bell here and someone packs the order. Then it gets scanned, put into the cubby, and then you'll get notified.

I asked to go inside with the robot and they said no because apparently that could happen. Okay, so this just turned green. This means our food is ready and we just grab it. We got a burger. My first ever burger made by a robot. Inside, it even looks medium rare. Even though there's There's no meat in here. Good job, robot. This is really good. Time for a truffle burger.

Ah, that's how we do it. Next up is No-Wan, famous for their decadent black truffle burger. This humble kitchen, we make about 1,000 burgers a week. So today we're gonna make a smoke black truffle burger for you. So these are two four-ounce patties. It's a custom blend of Chuck, Rib-Eye, and sirloin. So we smash it right into our griddle, and then we season one side with our umami seasoning blend. It's a special patented blend that we make here.

We let the bottom side of the. the patties crust up real nice. That's where the real flavor comes to for a burger. So we're gonna butter up our buns. We're gonna flip them over. Grape them off the bottom. Wow. Now we're gonna put some black truffle patte.

We want the flavors to be layered. That's a lot of truffle, huh? Yeah, we don't mess around. And right over that, we're gonna hit this with some smoked mozzarella. We get these cheese locally from Brooklyn. Smoke cheese works really well with some truffle. Now we're gonna layer it up.

We're gonna cover it with a dome. A little bit of water in there and some steam. We're cooking our homemade kimchi. Look at the flame. That's what you see in the sauce. All right, so burgers done. We're gonna let it rest. This is our black truffle kimchi special sauce.

We're gonna add some freshly minced onion. And I think this is really important. The circumference of the bread, it's edge to edge. This is our white truffle oil that we're drizzling over the top. Top bun goes on, and that's our burger. That's it. The contrast of the light orange color with the white cheese and then the darker caramelized beef is just awesome.

That bite right there is a blast of truffle. And just listen to these crispy edges. I asked for extra sauce, so it's a little bit messy, but if you like truffle, mm. Some of you might argue this next stop isn't technically a burger, but just wait until you see what they make. This is Chef Danny. Chef Danny. Sushi Chef Danny.

Danny's making the bun for a sushi burger. Basically, deep-constructed spicy tuna room. And this is just regular sushi rice that you would be using for sushi. This is Furekake, traditional Japanese rice seasoning. We've got norei, some beautiful number one tuna, a little oil. Some sesame seeds just a touch of spicy mayo and then you press this one together with your hands, huh? Yeah, he's a master We're gonna layer some watermelon radish Some cucumber looks like fresh crisp cucumber too

Absolutely a little bit of pickle ginger and some Wakame a little bit of avocado Oh, that is talent right there. That's beautiful. We got some ewesameo and we got some spicy mayo Sort of like an eel sauce and then top bun. Thank you chef Danny How can you tell me that this thing right here isn't a burger? It's got two nice buns and with sesame seeds on top, and it's got a patty in the form of raw fish. Yeah, listen, a sushi burger is a burger. Oh, I'm excited for this one.

Smash Burger. Ever heard of it? My name is Mike Puma, founder of Gothenberger Social Club. I opened this not as a place to serve burgers, but literally as a place to feed this community. The city was shut down during the pandemic, and it was a place for people to come outside and actually have a little bit of normalcy in their life again. Look at the setup down here.

This is so well prepped out. You're dealing high volume, volume you need everything to be very accessible ready to go right away you're toasting the top of the buns that's not the first move that most people do got to do things a little different so what do you love so much about burgers we always say nothing tastes better than memories to me it's not about the best burger it's the burger that reminds you your childhood so we tried to make a very nostalgic burger here you know I like having a little chew and keeping some of that

beefiness in the middle of the burger and then we hit it with our secret mop we don't discuss that which is okay I respect that and then just so and then here we just let the griddle do its thing. You almost want some burnt part of the onions on the outside, and then you're going to have some really nice sweet, soft onions under the paddy. American cheese melts the best. I can tell right here that you're going to get the perfect balance of the crispy edges, and then the center is a little bit taller, and you get that more mediumness. So from here we go down the line. Our signature pickle, we get made for a special. It's just the right amount of bite. You don't want to overpower anything. Do little pickled jalapinos.

Won't be too aggressive on the heat. So if I'm a baby with spice, I'm not going to get punched in the face. Promise. Then here is those Nistololubon. We just get a little kiss of ketchup just to know it's there. Same thing with yellow mustard our house-made club sauce And now we're just gonna finish it. I love the look of the top being toasted off like this like that's a masterpiece right there Thank you Mm-hmm never had a crunch like that before it goes back that texture my gosh I got the jalapeno it's not too spicy it's a phenomenal burger because you have the really soft fluffy bond on the bottom and you have the really hard crispy bun on the top and that's something that I've never ever had an a bird of

I was gonna film a Wagyu burger in the United States, but something just didn't feel right. So, I came all the way to Tokyo, Japan. This is Guy's burger. I actually found them on Instagram, where some of their burgers looked insane. They're sold out, but luckily, I know a guy. We try to make sure that nothing competes with the flavor of the beef.

There's just so many different farmers in Japan. There's 40,000 farmers. And through the burger, we want to introduce a little bit of these farmers. Well, let's see how it's done. This right here is the Kobe beef stamp. It means the cow was certified as Kobe beef. This is the 10 digit number that you can trace and see exactly where the cow was born, raised. In the United States, it's not like that.

Right, right. You just get some ground beef mystery meat. So this is the shank from the front part of the cow. We're going to start with the hatochimaki. It's the tenderest part of the shank there is. We're also going to put a little bit of this top sirloin on the blend. Most of the blends are usually 80-20, but because Waggou has a lot of marbling, we usually put no external fat in it.

Basically, Wagyu does all the work for you. So now that we have the blend ready, we're going to start weighing them because Wagyu has a really low melting point usually we put this like textile gloves that's crazy and then we put the latex ones I bet there's no other burger shop out there that really has to do this because anyone that's not working with Wagyu doesn't have this problem yeah we'll see it in the gloves soon I just grab them and then I do some of this smash and then I go like this oh I can't do it that fast nobody saw that and what is this doing

This is taking the air out of the beef. So when you're cooking it, it will stay as a patty. You can see all the fat already coming off, making a layer on the gloves, and it melts really fast. This is a really cool machine that can quickly make consistent patty for us. These are the 100 gram patties. Just this last weekend, we did about 100 patties in a day. By now, this machine has probably made us around 5,000 patties.

So first we like to toast the buns with Waggill tallow. And because it's so hot, it happens really quickly. Once those buns are finished, I set them off to the same. to get a little crust on them. And now it's time to cook the waggill paddy. We quickly put the salt before we throw the patties on the griddle. That way it creates a nice salt crust. And before we flip them, we also put salt.

That way the crusts on both sides. And the surface at this temperature allows us to get a really nice crust. We have the breads from the place called Daddy's Bakery. And then we add on the paddy. And after the paddy, we put our wagu mayo sauce with waggill tallo, as well as a really special Japanese egg called dragon egg. And to finish it off, we add some finely great. finely grated granopadono cheese.

And you can't forget the top bun. This is what I came all the way to Japan for. That's a damn good burger. Wagyu is definitely the star, but also the other ingredients that are there highlighted in the perfect, perfect way. At first I thought I was crazy for flying all the way to Japan for a Wagyu burger,

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