AlwaysInformed: The Butter Burger

GutterGourmet — January 25, 2010

Lexington Candy Shop’s Butter Burger goes great with one of their Chocolate Malteds.

The Lexington Candy Shop on the corner of 83rd and Lexington Avenue proudly announces its most well-known specialties beneath its windows: “Malteds, Sundaes and Fountain Service. But it’s most interesting menu item, the Lexington Butter Burger, is curiously less heralded.

The windows contain an amazing collection of international and limited edition Coca-Cola bottles, all full. They still mix the Coke using syrup and soda water in iconic glasses as done in 1925 when the restaurant was established. The soda “jerks” know what they’re doing. They’re equally adept at mixing a mean egg cream, and what is perhaps the City’s best chocolate malted (at $8 it may be the planet’s most expensive). But you’re here for the Butter Burger.

George Motz, in his invaluable guide, “Hamburger America,” documented the Butter Burger as being invented at Solly’s in Milwaukee. You don’t need to visit Wisconsin to know that slapping a half-stick of butter on a burger makes sense. The Lexington Candy Shop version ($7.50, $9 for the jumbo) is made with their standard thin burger set on a bun from Orwasher’s Bakery, with iceberg lettuce and tomato on the side. The jerk uses a spatula to scoop out a heaping pat of butter from a huge metal container. Watching the butter melt and run with the juices of the burger is sheer ecstasy.

The thin, generic beef patty doesn’t permit cooking to temperature preference, but the butter helps the flavor immeasurably. The butter is warm and runny, but the pat is pleasantly cool in the center. It’s the poor man’s version of Minetta Tavern’s clarified butter-drizzled, Black Label Burger.