Our Story
Thin patties, hard sear, cold beer, open till midnight
The building at 1907 Kessler Avenue was a transmission shop for forty-one years. When Dana Okoye signed the lease in 2016 the lift was still bolted to the floor and there was a drain in the middle of the room. She cut the lift out, left the drain, and put a six-foot flat-top where the bay doors used to be.
She had spent nine years in hotel kitchens downtown, the last three running a room that plated 180 covers a night and made her hate cooking. She wanted to make one thing, make it fast, and go home at one in the morning. Ten years later that is still the whole business plan.
The burger
We buy chuck and brisket from a butcher in Redfern, grind it coarse in the afternoon, and roll it into 2.5-ounce balls. Nothing goes in it. No egg, no breadcrumb, no seasoning until it hits the steel.
The griddle sits at 450 degrees. A ball goes down, a press goes on top for ten seconds, and it gets flattened out past the edge of where a burger should be. That thin edge is the whole point. It goes brown and lacy and slightly burnt, and when we scrape it up we take all of it with the patty. Cheese on, roll on, thirty seconds under a cloche, out the window. Four minutes from order to tray.
If we did it slower it would be worse. That is not a slogan, it is just how a smash burger works.
The crew
Dana Okoye owns the place and still works the griddle four nights a week. She will tell you the Standard is the best burger on the menu and she is not being modest about it.
Marcus Vance runs the bar and picks the taps. Twenty lines, most of them from within a hundred miles, nothing over eight dollars. He has turned down every offer to put a national brand on line one since 2018 and he brings it up often.
Rosalind Teague has run the fryer since 2017. She cuts the potatoes, keeps the tallow honest, and is the reason the fries are the thing people actually argue about.
What we will not do
We will not take a reservation. We will not put a burger under a heat lamp. We will not toast a bun in a toaster when there is a griddle right there.
We close Mondays so everyone gets the same day off. The board over the counter has said WALK IN, ORDER, SIT DOWN since the first week, in the same handwriting, and it is staying up.