![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/71bdd18fc0820c6752a4e573bea7bbbb2e-Le-Burger-Lunar-New-Year.rsquare.w700.jpg\")
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\n New York subscribers got exclusive early access to this story in\u00a0Eating New York<\/strong>, a newsletter featuring food news and advice straight from our critics\u2019 mouths. Sign up here<\/strong><\/a> to get it in your inbox.\n <\/p>\n \n Les Burgers at Le B. There are good reasons no one puts burgers into time capsules. If they could, there\u2019d be few foodstuffs that more accurately oozed the juices of their particular moments. To reference the DB Bistro Moderne foie burger to one who was there or the preeminence of the Shake Shack Shackburger in that prelapsarian moment where getting one required an hour-long wait in Madison Square Park \u2014 before these memories, the madeleine crumbles. Of course, status burgers have both elevated and aggravated chefs for as long as they\u2019ve been griddling them. Like a sesame-seeded eclipse, a famous burger can cast the rest of a chef\u2019s creations into the shade.<\/p>\n Two of the great status burgers of the twenty-teens belonged to Angie Mar, then at the Beatrice Inn, and Billy Durney at Red Hook Tavern<\/a>. Both have drawn breathless coverage and stampeding crowds. \u201cThe burger is off the charts. I think about it at night,\u201d Graydon Carter, then the Beatrice\u2019s owner, said<\/a> of Mar\u2019s burger not long after it was introduced in 2013. The rest of Mar\u2019s menu was meaty and ambitious, but one imagines she knew the security that a famous burger can provide \u2014 before Beatrice, she was sous-chef at April Bloomfield\u2019s Spotted Pig. Mar bought the Beatrice for herself in 2016. Durney\u2019s Red Hook Tavern burger came a little later; after years of delay, the Tavern opened in 2019, at which point its pubbier burger, modeled after Peter Luger\u2019s simply dressed lunchtime-only burger, was quickly branded essential.<\/p>\n In the years since, Mar and Durney took diverging burger journeys. Durney leaned in. The Red Hook Tavern burger has never been limited by anything but available seats and is a mainstay of the menu at not only the original Red Hook Tavern but also its Sag Harbor sibling<\/a>. Mar leaned out. At Le B.<\/a>, her successor to the Beatrice, she limited the burger to nine per night \u2014 one for each bar seat \u2014 before removing it from the menu entirely. \u201cIt\u2019s a love-hate relationship for sure,\u201d she told the New York Times last year<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m 110 percent proud of it. But no matter what cuisine I create, or how accomplished I am, everyone will ask me about the burger.\u201d<\/p>\n Fate has a way of leading you back. This spring finds Mar and Durney each, for their own reasons, reintroducing or rejiggering their burgers. Durney teased a new version of his now-classic at Tavern Next Door<\/a>, the \u201970s-style cocktail bar opened next to Red Hook Tavern. Mar announced at the beginning of the month that she\u2019d be bringing back Le Burger to Le B throughout the summer, as part of a celebration of ten years since she\u2019d purchased the Beatrice.<\/p>\n When the chefs bow to the will of fate, what choice does the critic have? On a Sunday night soon after opening, I took my seat at Tavern Next Door. It is, quite literally, next door to the original, though kept dark enough that it seems like the \u201cnight\u201d version to the big Tavern\u2019s \u201cday.\u201d Next Door (where the focus is Conor Johns\u2019s cocktails) shares its kitchen with the original and, for now, about half the menu from the new bar comes from its established neighbor. There are a few cutesy additions \u2014 \u201cBilly\u2019s Breakfast Corndogs,\u201d with maple breakfast sausage and powdered sugar, and artichoke-heart-and-pimento-cheese poppers \u2014 but the real news is a new burger, which is actually neither new nor a burger: It\u2019s the original burger, miniaturized and recast as a pair of adorable, Pog-size sliders. \u201cSame beef blend, same bun,\u201d my server reported, just smaller. Even at two to an order, they\u2019re still about half the overall size of the big boy next door. (The cottage fries, in my unscientific comparison, seem about the same.) The sliders maintain the juiciness of their larger sibling, though I suspect scaling the patties down ups the ratio of bread to beef. Still, as a cocktail nibble \u2014\u00a0I got about four bites to a burger \u2014\u00a0I had no complaints, and at $24 to the larger burger\u2019s $34, the price was reasonable enough.<\/p>\n The spirit is less playful at Le B., where I made a reservation for dinner a few days later. Despite an announcement in the Times heralding Le Burger\u2019s return,\u00a0it wasn\u2019t listed on the menu, and it wasn\u2019t among the day\u2019s specials that our server recited. But when requested, it appeared. We ordered a full complement of other dishes \u2014 very good Tasmanian sea trout in dill-scented sauce, halibut crusted in brioche, p\u00e2t\u00e9 en croute \u2014though when Mar made her way around the dining room, she seemed to chill a bit upon seeing it. \u201cI guess it\u2019s what everyone wants from me,\u201d she said tightly. \u201cInteresting.\u201d Her pique is understandable. Le B. still flies the flag for French theatricality: There are multiple dishes on the menu that call for the entrance of a marble-topped cart, from which a server or Mar herself will flamb\u00e9 roast duckling, au poivre sauce, or cr\u00eapes Suzette in a tower of flame. But there\u2019s more competition in this space than there once was (I\u2019d recently been flamb\u00e9ed nearby, at Golden Steer), and the restaurant was less populated than it once had been; there were three other tables occupied during our weekday evening, although admittedly one of them was hosting Billy Porter, worrying aloud about the effect of cr\u00eapes Suzette on his blood sugar.<\/p>\n Over the course of the evening, Mar softened a bit. \u201cIt\u2019s a great burger,\u201d she admitted when we offered our compliments. \u201cIt has its own MasterClass<\/a>.\u201d It hasn\u2019t changed, she said, since its inception in 2013: same Cabernet-braised onions, same Fromager d\u2019Affinois, a double-cr\u00e8me cheese from Lyon. The burger wars have continued, and Mar\u2019s remains a contender: bassily beefy, with a blackened exterior hiding crust-to-crust pink within. (No one asked what doneness I\u2019d like, and no one needed to.) There is one difference this time around, though. The price of the burger will shift based on beef prices, as vulnerable as any other commodity to the buffeting of inflation: According to the Consumer Price Index released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, beef prices are up 14.8 percent year over year as of May. When the bill for my burger came, the price was $72 \u2014 a reminder of how much has changed in the decade since its debut.<\/p>\n Sign up for Eating New York<\/p>\n Weekly food news, straight from our critics\u2019 mouths and just for subscribers.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
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\n Photo: Mike Vitelli\n <\/p>\n