How To Make The Cheeseburger From The Menu

If you've seen the dark comedy "The Menu," you know the cheeseburger in question is the most important piece of food in a film centered around fine dining. After a deeply upsetting haute cuisine experience at Hawthorn, an exclusive restaurant situated on an island and run by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), only one of the guests, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), is left relatively unscathed. At that point, she tells Julian that she's actually still hungry ... and asks for a simple cheeseburger, calling back to Julian's past as a line cook and helping him recapture the pure joy of cooking. Julian makes the burger, and allows Margot to take it "to go," and she eats it as she escapes the island, watching as Julian burns Hawthorn and everyone in it to the ground.

The meaning of this particular cheeseburger from "The Menu" has been discussed half to death at this point, so let's turn our attention to the burger itself. If you're a burger-eater, you can't deny it's a thing of beauty — a double smashburger with American cheese and thinly sliced sauteed onions on a sesame seed bun, with a side of fries. (The whole thing also goes for $9.95, according to Julian, which is a pretty solid deal.) So how do you make this cheeseburger, and how did the team behind "The Menu" come up with the platonic ideal of a cheeseburger?

On the YouTube channel Binging with Babish, chef Andrew Rea recreates menu items from pop culture. He took on the burger from "The Menu," first slicing an onion in a way that he describes as "pole to pole," cutting the halves on a vertical axis rather than the traditional horizontal onion chop. He accompanies this with some frozen crinkle-cut fries thrown into a deep fryer at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for three to five minutes. The "burger balls" measure around four ounces apiece (so he can achieve Margot's desired temperature of "medium"), and after he shapes those, he toasts a sesame seed bun on a flat-top griddle.

Rea then says that, when it comes to the burgers, they're not so much "smashed" as "smeared," and he presses two patties onto the griddle with a large spatula, seasoning them with salt and pepper while cooking. According to Rea, Julian cooks his burgers "Oklahoma style," which just means to take those thinly sliced onions and press them into the burger while it's cooking on that first side ... which then cooks the onions as the burgers get flipped. The flip also means that both patties get topped with sliced American cheese, which Julian says in the film is perfect for a burger because of the way it melts. Put the patties on top of one another, put them on the bun, and you've got the burger from "The Menu."

A burger might seem like a simple concept, but the process of creating the one for "The Menu" was anything but. Established chefs Dominque Crenn and John Benhase worked with director Mark Mylod behind the scenes to make sure the cooking process was as authentic as possible. Benhase spoke to Vanity Fair about the process of creating the cheeseburger and said that the classic style of the burger came about after a discussion about the vibe of the dish. "'Hey, I think if we do this burger this way, then it'll be a perfect fit because it still is such a process-driven burger,'" Benhase recalled saying to the creative team. "It's not just slapping a couple of patties on a grill and flipping them a couple times. It can be this labor of love. That's part of what makes it work within the film."

Benhase then explained the exact process behind the burger: "The press of the burger—you have to get the flipper really hot and lubed up, I guess is the best word for it, ... And then how to flip the burger where you can get every aspect of the Maillard reaction and sear to get all those wonderful crispy parts of it. The process of the burger, you cook the onions underneath the burger when you flip it so that they cook in all that beautiful beef fat and kind of flavor the burger from underneath. It's just every step being really intentional with why you're doing it."