Burgers starting with S
124 burgers: 112 from chain menus, 2 from film and TV, 10 homemade. Titles starting with “The” are filed under the next word.
Named after the founder’s background: grass-fed beef with American cheese, caramelised onion, pickles and Thousand Island.
The Galley Boy made with a veggie burger instead of beef.
Smash burgers are usually beef, but the method works with salmon too: loose balls of chopped fish pressed thin onto a very hot pan, so they cook in minutes and pick up a golden crust.
The spicy option, though spicy by Japanese standards.
Salted egg yolk is a very old Chinese preserving technique, but its fame as a sauce is recent.
A 180 g patty with Gorgonzola Dolce, smoked mushrooms, bacon and a truffled black-garlic mayonnaise on brioche.
The Habit started in 1969 as a burger stand in Goleta, a few miles from Santa Barbara, and this is the burger named after home.
Guacamole, raw onion and Cheddar, with chips and salsa as an optional extra.
Satay, grilled skewered meat with a peanut sauce, is a dish of Indonesia and Malaysia.
The pared-back double: two 110 g dry-aged patties, double American cheese, double bacon and smoky mayonnaise.
The Sauceburger is as old as Pal’s itself.
The most savoury burger on the menu and the least flashy.
Ground turkey is lean and mild, so this recipe leans on two pantry shortcuts for flavour: a packet of dry onion soup mix and a spoonful of soy sauce.
A flame-grilled patty with crispy onion, barbecue sauce and caramelised onion, topped with a “crispy secret cheese” and creamy Buffalo sauce.
The grilled alternative to the fried thighs (秘制烤鸡腿堡): a whole chicken thigh roasted in a dark, glossy marinade, with lettuce and a creamy white sauce in a sesame bun.
Seven-layer dip, the party spread of beans, sour cream, guacamole, salsa, cheese and toppings, is the idea behind these sliders.
It began as the obvious question from people standing in the queue: why choose between the cheeseburger and the ’Shroom Burger.
The ShackBurger arrived with the permanent kiosk in Madison Square Park in 2004.
A mushroom cheeseburger: sautéed mushrooms, cheddar and creamy mayonnaise on a pure beef patty.
A beef grillburger with iceberg and homemade shoarma sauce, borrowed from the shoarma sandwiches sold all over Dutch cities.
Voted Valencia’s best burger in 2021: a dry-aged patty with Cheddar, thick bacon, salted-caramel peanut butter and mum’s BBQ sauce.
Not a patty at all: crispy fried shrimp piled on a steamed bun with ketchup and the chain’s homemade slaw.
The shrimp burger has been such a steady seller in Korea that Lotteria turned a limited-edition square double shrimp burger into a permanent menu item in 2021, after customers kept asking for it back.
Lotteria developed the shrimp burger itself in 1977, first selling it as the “ebi hamburger”: small shrimp formed into a croquette-like patty.
Burgers on rice buns started in Japan, where MOS Burger served its first rice burger in 1987: instead of bread, two discs of cooked rice pressed together and grilled until the outside crisps.
A mushroom Swiss done a little more carefully than most: crimini mushrooms, Swiss, caramelised onions and roasted garlic aïoli on an Angus patty with lettuce and tomato.
Most chains treat the vegetarian burger as an afterthought bolted on decades later.
The burger the chain launched with in 2003: a seasoned Angus patty, 4 or 6 oz, with relish, tomato, onion, Canadian cheddar and Hero sauce on a sesame bun.
The spicy burger; sili is the Filipino word for chilli.
The vegetarian burger: a deep-fried patty of vegetables fermented for ten days, with American cheese, onion, lettuce and house sauce.
Grill’d opened in Hawthorn, Melbourne, in 2004 pitching itself against fast food rather than against other burger shops: grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, chips that are not swimming in oil.
Brendan Sodikoff opened Au Cheval as a small diner in Chicago’s West Loop in 2012, and the same year Bon Appétit named its cheeseburger the best in America.
The Impossible Burger was launched in July 2016 at David Chang’s restaurant Momofuku Nishi in New York.
Hundred Burgers opened in Valencia in 2020 after its founders spent three years eating more than three hundred burgers in 22 countries.
Despite the name, it is two patties, just without the bun: the beef and your choice of toppings served on their own.
The burger that wins the contest.
The beef burger (牛气冲天堡).
The biggest burger on the menu: three 100g smashed beef patties with three slices of Gouda, sweet pickle and RocoMayo.
The chicken burger: Southern fried chicken with YoMayo, spicy coleslaw, aged Gouda and bacon on a brioche bun.
This recipe crosses two American classics.
This burger is half smashburger, half sloppy joe.
Marry me chicken is a creamy chicken dish with sun-dried tomatoes and Parmesan that spread quickly online, named after the idea that it is good enough to earn a proposal.
Pressing a ball of beef flat on a hot griddle is one of the oldest ways to cook a hamburger.
A best-seller whose name marks the chain’s twenty years: two smashed patties of Italian beef with a Pecorino Romano DOP sauce, guanciale, iceberg lettuce and a mustard mayonnaise with sun-dried…
This smash burger is cooked outdoors, but not on the grate.
A cool, creamy burger for people who find the gourmet list a bit much.
The chain’s take on the smash burger: a thinner 3 oz Angus patty with cheddar, tomato, lettuce, onion, pickles, ketchup and mustard on a potato bun.
The smashed double is the shape the whole burger world turned to in the early 2020s, when smash burgers became the trend of the decade far beyond the United States.
Jack in the Box joining the smash burger craze.
The entry-level smash burger from Goiko’s menu of the day: two smashed beef patties with American cheese, tomato, lettuce and the 50 Burger Spread.
A smoky, crunchy diner burger with bacon, cheddar, onion rings and a barbecue sauce.
A burger that brings a second meat to the party.
The meatiest burger on the menu: a lamb patty and a chicken patty together with an egg and BBQ sauce in a whole-wheat bun.
Shake Shack came out of Danny Meyer’s restaurant group, and its sourcing rules were set before it had a single permanent address: whole-muscle Angus beef with no hormones or antibiotics, and bacon to…
An Irish beef patty with smoked cheese, crispy bacon, Rocket Rings, Bicke’s relish and secret sauce.
Mustafa Yusuf opened in Toronto in 2007 under the name Craft Burger, could not trademark it, and renamed the business in 2011 after the city’s old nickname, the Big Smoke.
Patty & Bun names its burgers after pop-culture figures, and this one is a pun twice over.
Rösti began as a farmers’ breakfast in the Swiss canton of Bern and neighbouring Fribourg: coarsely grated potatoes fried in a pan until a golden crust forms.
The chain’s big barbecue burger: a double Swiss beef patty with double Cheddar, bacon, Cajun mayo, ketchup, BBQ sauce, onion confit and lettuce.
Part of a short-lived 2019 barbecue line in the US: crispy chicken with a thick, smoky barbecue sauce and pickles.
Aged Galician beef with smoked English Cheddar, mushroom duxelles, truffle mayonnaise, pickles, bacon shavings and a crisp coral tuile on house brioche.
The Baconator worked so well after its 2007 launch that Wendy’s spent years extending it in both directions — bigger versions, breakfast versions, and in 2012 a smaller one for the value menu.
America had thousands of drive-ins in the 1950s and almost none by the 1980s: land got expensive, the drive-thru window was faster, and eating in a parked car went out of fashion.
Sonic’s newer Angus smash burger, built for people who want crispy edges rather than a thick patty.
Two patties with garlic-parmesan butter, bacon and Swiss on butter-toasted sourdough, more like a patty melt than a burger.
Jack in the Box has never been precious about the bun, which is how a chain from San Diego ended up with its best-known burger served on grilled sourdough instead.
The Sourdough Melt is Culver’s version of the patty melt, an American diner sandwich that puts a hamburger patty, melted cheese and fried onions between two slices of griddled bread instead of a bun.
Two patties with Swiss cheese and mushrooms on butter-toasted sourdough.
Angus beef with American cheese, bacon, barbecue sauce and onion rings.
Fried pickles are younger than most people assume.
Beef with bacon and avocado, as CNN described it: salty bacon against creamy avocado.
The loaded one: cheddar, bacon, crispy onion straws, BBQ sauce and a chipotle mayo, with lettuce, tomato and pickles.
“Special Agent” is the house cheeseburger: a Black Angus patty with cheddar and the chain’s own ketchup.
The same all-beef patty with a spicy seasoning worked into the meat instead of plain salt and pepper.
The mock beef patty with vegan cheese, onion and lettuce, topped with a Tabasco tomato sauce, jalapeños and chilli mayo.
A crispy 150 g fried chicken breast with creamy chipotle mayo, pickles, jalapeños, pineapple, lettuce and red onion on brioche.
The fried chicken burger with heat, in the Korean style of spice that is sweet and fiery at once.
This is a pub-style chicken burger in two parts: a whole chicken breast marinated in beer and spices, and a beer cheese sauce poured over the top instead of a slice of cheese.
These chicken burgers bring the heat from inside the patty.
A flat spicy chicken fillet (香辣鸡排堡) instead of a thigh, in the same flaky, heavily textured coating, with lettuce and a creamy white sauce in a sesame bun.
Chick-fil-A sold the same sandwich, unchanged, for nearly fifty years before adding heat to it.
The same crispy fillet and brioche bun with the mayo swapped for a spicy sauce.
Popeyes is a spicy chain because its first version failed.
Wendy’s had a spicy chicken sandwich on American menus through the late 1990s, twenty years before Popeyes set off a national argument about who made the best one.
The spicy version of the crispy chicken sandwich.
The burger Wallace is known for (香辣鸡腿堡): a chicken thigh in a spicy, deeply craggy fried coating, with lettuce and a creamy white sauce in a sesame bun.
The chain calls it “the classic”: a crunchy, spicy fried chicken thigh in the hand-rolled bun.
Almost every chicken burger in fast food is a whole muscle — a breast or a thigh, breaded and fried.
Chick-fil-A spent decades selling essentially one chicken sandwich, and adding heat was a big step for the chain.
The Spicy Habanero McChicken started life as the middle step of a Canadian heat ladder.
It arrived in February 2021 alongside the plain and deluxe versions, McDonald’s late entry into the chicken sandwich war Popeyes started in 2019.
The hot one.
Pepper Jack cheese, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, pineapple salsa and sriracha mayo.
The Royal Crispy Chicken glazed with a triple-pepper spicy sauce.
The burger people come back for when they are tired of beef: a crispy shrimp patty made in-house, with sriracha, sesame Thai slaw, sriracha aïoli, lettuce and tomato.
Spinach and feta are the classic spanakopita pairing, and here they go into ground turkey to fix its two usual problems: blandness and dryness.
Sriracha is named after Si Racha, a coastal district of Thailand where commercial production of the chilli sauce began in the 1930s; the Sriraja Panich brand, sold from 1935, made it famous.
The name undersells it.
A best-seller dressed with salad: beef on a sesame bun with fresh tomato, white sauce, pickled cucumber, iceberg lettuce, white onion and melted Cheddar.
The flagship of the bigger-burger range: all-beef patties with American-style cheese, roasted onions and ketchup.
The chain’s first fish Hamburgé: a hot-smoked salmon steak with semi-dried tomatoes and a double helping of Sauce Franche, the house white sauce.
Stewie takes a fast-food job, eats his way through a stack of fish sandwiches that were past their hold time anyway, and is sick on the spot.
A vegan spicy chicken burger: the crumbed Stinger patty with vegan cheese, vegan bacon, spicy mayo and lettuce in a toasted bun.
The name comes from the trains.
The rice burger is a Japanese invention.
The top of the social ladder: a double patty of Australian beef with double cheese.
Bob Wian built the original double-decker in 1937 out of leftovers and showmanship, and for twenty years it had no serious imitator.
The most Californian thing on the menu: a patty with a double layer of melted Swiss, lettuce, tomato, Ruby’s Burger Sauce and sliced avocado, served on grilled Parmesan sourdough instead of a bun.
The spicy chicken burger in its fuller form: a spicy fried chicken patty with a slice of cheese, tomato and shredded lettuce.
The standard Herfy burger with everything on it: a beef patty with a slice of cheese, fresh onion, tomato and shredded lettuce.
The double: two 180g flame-grilled beef patties with Cheddar, lettuce, tomato and homemade mayonnaise.
A crispy chicken patty topped with two cheesy nacho triangles and spicy dynamite mayonnaise on the chain’s newer signature bun.
The theatrical one: aged beef with smoked Cheddar and Gouda, smoked bacon, caramelised onion, pickles and smoky sauce, brought to the table under a cloche of orange-wood smoke.
The new smash burger: two Irish beef patties “smashed with unapologetic culinary aggression”, with American cheese, pickles, onions and smash sauce.
The SuperSONIC with bacon added, for when the parking lot calls for something heavier.
The burger most people order from the car without looking at the menu.
A burger that puts the side dish inside.
Surf and turf, meat and seafood on one plate, has a surprisingly long history.
The venison burger, with a name that makes children wince.
Bison came close to disappearing.
Big Boy was never one company.
A mushroom Swiss with a twist: the sautéed mushrooms and Swiss cheese get barbecue sauce and mayo rather than just their own juices.
A grilled beef patty with melted Swiss, sautéed mushrooms, caramelised onions, arugula and truffle aioli.
“The sister” to Brorsan: two patties, pickled red onion, double Cheddar, pickles, caramelised onion and Rekas sauce.