The Best Burger in America It sounds like it from this rave review in GQ, and looks like it from the photo. Let's face it, it gets harder and harder to find a burger in this country with actual flavor. Our taste buds have been dumbed down by the likes of McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, and all the rest. We make a really good burger at the restaurant, but we use Black Angus beef, which still tastes like beef. Imagine that. This, on the other hand, sounds like heaven:
Then I tasted the Umami Burger, Adam Fleischman's cross-cultural merger of Japanese ingenuity and American know-how. And I thought to myself, This is a man among burger men, worthy of our adulation even if he's always wearing a T-shirt with an Umami Burger logo. (These days, even the greats can't resist self-promotion.)
Fleischman, the founder of the modest but ever expanding four-shop Umami Burger chain, has rethought every element of the hamburger experience. The bun. The meat. The ketchup. The toppings. Even valet parking. Yes, at the original Umami Burger joint on La Brea, 900 square feet of utter simplicity across the road from a Goodwill store, every burger comes with parking, the ultimate in West Coast customer service.
Elsewhere in L.A., the burger world is in disarray. So desperate is the situation, so uncertain are the natives, that at least one establishment specializing in burgers is flying in chopped meat from the LaFrieda purveyors in Manhattan. The old L.A. order—In-N-Out Burger, Fatburger, Bob's Big Boy, Tommy's—is in retreat.
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