RED HOOK TAVERN BIRGER
"Is IT WORTH $30" ???
GREAT BURGERS at an AFFORDABLE PRICE
"THANK YOU CAFETERIA at JUBILEE MARKET"
This is a GREAT PUBLIC SERVICE to BROOKLYN NY & MANKIND
All of the ingredients for the burger come from the attached supermarket, which is one reason the price is lower. But that’s not all that’s happening. Kim is doing something unheard of in the restaurant industry and selling the burgers “at cost,” the price of ingredients, plus labor, before a dish is marked up for sale. He makes about five cents on each burger, meaning for every thousand he sells, he makes about fifty bucks.
You can look at his burger as a loss leader — a way to get people into the grocery store downstairs, where the prices are higher. But the longer you talk to Kim, you might start to view it as his life’s work. “It’s expensive to eat in this neighborhood,” he says. “We wanted to do something everyone could enjoy.”
Some days, he flips patties behind the grill. That’s where Rob Martinez, a producer at Righteous Eats, found him earlier this month. Martinez says he was drawn to Kim’s personality. “If there’s not a real person behind [the business], we wouldn’t do a story,” he said in a text message. He profiled the business in a video that has since been viewed more than 500,000 times between TikTok and Instagram.
“This burger costs less than the subway,” Martinez says on camera. Jubilee Market is now selling hundreds of them a day.
Kim has actually been selling burgers since last year, but until recently, they were bigger and more expensive. “It wasn’t clicking,” he says. One day he did something wild: He came into work with a bag of White Mana hamburgers, which were cold because they came from New Jersey, and he asked his business partner to perform a miracle. “He wanted me to recreate them,” says Samantha La Manna, “but better.”
So, La Manna went downstairs, where the market performs whole-animal butchery, and took some meat left over from trimming steaks. She ground it up, shaped it into a patty, and cooked it on a flat top grill with shaved onions, like at White Mana. Unlike White Mana, she put a clove of slow-roasted garlic in the middle. It seeps into the patty’s pores, making the meat taste buttery and homemade.
It’s not a White Mana burger, but it is a La Manna one, and it’s wonderful.
Those are the touches of a career chef. Before La Manna was making two-buck burgers, she worked at several Brooklyn restaurants, including Cozy Royale. Two years ago, she was up for a job at Francie, a Michelin-starred restaurant, when she saw something funny: a grocery store had posted a job listing on Indeed looking for a “culinary director.” Thankfully, she applied.
Kim and La Manna are now doing everything they can to keep up with demand. Before they were featured on Righteous Eats, they were selling maybe 200 burgers a day. But overnight, the number doubled. Then it doubled again. Most days, they sell around 600 to 1,000 burgers, but the most they’ve sold is 1,300. On days like that, they sell out and have to close early.
You don’t have to do the math to know the burgers aren’t making anyone rich. And for once, that might not matter.
The cafeteria at Jubilee Market is open from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. The burger is available from noon to 9 p.m.
MAKE The PERFECT BURGER !!!
"NEW YORK'S Most AFFORDABLE BURGER" !!!
PRESIDENT POLK LOVED CREOLE CUISINE
Like ANTOINE'S in NEW ORLEANS
The burgers, an impressively affordable $7.25 apiece, are on the smaller side—a hungry diner could easily down two or three before pausing for breath. They are also available with double patties ($11.50), though it seems foolish to disturb the single patty’s perfect ratio of bread to meat. Despite all the fanfare, I found the onion burger a little bland—a few shakes of hot sauce liven it up, though doctoring it at all feels a bit sacrilegious. But the Classic Smash is fantastic, strong and correct. You don’t need to know the history of burgers to be taken with its honest flavors, its modest size, its firm handshake of pickle and onion and good ol’ American ground beef. It’s a hamburger you trust, a hamburger you’d feel good about taking your daughter to prom.
In addition to the two hamburgers, there are fries, of course (thin and crisp, but oversalted on one visit and not quite salty enough on another), plus a handful of simple, school-lunch-ish sandwiches, including tuna salad made with sweet pickle relish, and a deeply satisfying peanut-butter-and-jelly. There’s an unfussy grilled cheese (American, on buttered bread), and a secret, off-menu sandwich that I’ve seen described elsewhere, inaccurately, as a patty melt. In fact, it’s a grilled cheese with a smash-burger patty inside it, and it’s singularly terrific. There’s a milk menu, your choice of plain or chocolate or coffee (a Rhode Island specialty, made with Autocrat-brand coffee syrup, sweet and bitter); the latter two can be topped with a squirt of seltzer to make a very decent egg cream. The best seats in the house are at the L-shaped counter—especially the stools right in front of the burger station, where Motz himself is likely to be captaining the griddle. He’s tall and muttonchopped, with a medusa-like shock of silver hair. A cartoon version of his grinning face is the restaurant’s logo, silk-screened onto the breast of yellow T-shirts, sewn as a patch on the sleeves of crisp white chefs’ shirts, and laser-etched onto the blade of Motz’s own “Smashula,” a custom tool he wields theatrically to flatten and flip each patty.
On one of my visits to Hamburger America, no fewer than three employees mentioned, unprompted, that the hot ham sandwich was the sleeper hit of the whole menu. They did not lie. I watched as Motz piled a tidy mountain of meat, freshly thin-sliced, onto the flattop, draping two slices of lacy Swiss cheese overtop. He left the whole thing to warm under a metal cloche until it was melty and rich, then transferred it to a butter-toasted burger bun. As Motz wrapped the finished sandwich in parchment paper and slid the plate to me across the counter, he asked if I was from the Midwest. I said that I was from Chicago, and he shook his head. “Almost! It’s a real Milwaukee thing, this sandwich,” he said, before turning his focus back to the whack-a-mole of the griddle, full of patties in various stages of historically accurate smash. Looking it up later, I learned that hot ham and rolls has, for generations, been a Sunday tradition in southeast Wisconsin, when families line up at their favorite bakeries for an easy, affordable post-church meal.
