The smash-burger wave: did LA's Burgers Never Say Die start it?

A smash burger is a small act of violence with a delicious result. You take a loose, un-pressed ball of beef, drop it on a screaming-hot flat-top, and smash it thin with a stiff spatula or a weighted press, holding it down so the entire bottom face slams into the metal. The beef doesn’t poach in its own juices the way a thick pub patty does — it sears, the surface browning into a lacy, crackly, lace-edged crust. That crust, all Maillard, is the entire point. Los Angeles has a strong claim on the modern restaurant version of this — and a much weaker one on the technique itself. ^[3]

The technique is old

Smashing beef on a griddle is not new and not from LA. The Oklahoma onion burger — a Depression-era trick of smashing a thin patty into a pile of shaved onions so the onions griddle into the meat — is the canonical ancestor, and American diner and drive-in cooks have been pressing patties on flat-tops for the better part of a century (it cooks faster and feeds a lunch rush). Even the fast-food chains smash, after a fashion. So “who invented the smash burger” has a boring answer: nobody, it’s just how you cook a thin patty on a griddle, and it’s been done forever. ^[3]

What is recent: the smash burger as its own concept

What changed in the late 2010s is that “smash burger” stopped being a method and became a restaurant category — places that exist specifically to do this one thing, with the crust as the headline, often paired with American cheese, soft potato buns, shredded lettuce, and a “house sauce.” The chain Smashburger (founded 2007, Denver) put the word on signage; the craft version — small, chef-ish, line-out-the-door — is the 2018-onward thing.

LA’s claim runs through Burgers Never Say Die, which opened in Silver Lake in 2019 and bills itself as LA’s first dedicated smash-burger brick-and-mortar. That’s a careful, narrow claim — “first dedicated smash-burger brick-and-mortar in LA” — and on those terms it’s defensible: not the technique, not the first burger ever smashed in LA, but a real claim on the concept-restaurant moment locally. ^[1][2]

The LA cohort that followed

Burgers Never Say Die didn’t stay alone. The LA smash-burger scene that filled in around it includes For The Win, HiHo Cheeseburger (which leans on grass-fed beef as its angle), Goldburger, Heavy Handed, and Trueburger, among others — a recognizable cluster, enough that Delicioso created a smash-burger-joint place_type (a child of burger-joint) specifically to hold it, citing the 2019 Burgers Never Say Die anchor and the half-dozen-plus operators around it. ^[1]

The national context

LA’s wave is a local chapter of a national story. The chain Smashburger normalized the name; Shake Shack (East Coast, thin-patty, crusty) primed the broader audience; and the whole movement plays out partly as a foil to In-N-Out — the thin-but-not-aggressively-smashed Double-Double — and to the thick pub burger that dominated the 2000s gastropub era. The “is a smash burger better than In-N-Out?” argument is a genuine LA dinner-table debate, which tells you the format landed here. ^[3]

Where it sits in LA burger history

LA already had a deep burger canon before any of this: In-N-Out (founded 1948, Baldwin Park), The Apple Pan (1947, with its hickory burger and counter-only seating), Hawkins House of Burgers (Watts, 1939 — a Black-owned legacy stand; a 2021 Caltrans land-encroachment dispute was resolved in 2022), Fatburger (1947), Cassell’s, Pie ‘n Burger (1963), and the chef-driven turn of the 2000s led by Father’s Office (Sang Yoon’s blue-cheese, caramelized-onion, no-substitutions burger). The smash-burger wave is the newest layer on that stack — the late-2010s concept-restaurant beat, sitting next to the fast-food canon, the legacy walk-up stands, and the gastropub burger, not replacing any of them. ^[1][3]

The verdict

Did LA start the smash-burger wave? No — the technique is a century old and the modern term came from a Denver chain. But LA — via Burgers Never Say Die in 2019 and the cohort behind it — has a legitimate claim on the concept-restaurant-format moment: the point where “smash burger” became a thing you open a restaurant to be, locally. That’s the claim Delicioso records: not invention, but a real and dated stake in the format’s restaurant era. ^[1][2]

Notes for reviewers

• “LA’s first dedicated smash-burger brick-and-mortar, 2019” — Burgers Never Say Die uses this framing, and trade press (Eater LA, Time Out) repeated “first brick-and-mortar smash burger joint in LA” at its February 2019 opening; the draft keeps it framed as a claim, which is the right caution.
• Hawkins House of Burgers / Caltrans: the dispute that began in June 2021 was resolved in 2022 (Hawkins announced a solution March 16, 2022) — the body text has been updated accordingly; the “currently threatened” framing is outdated.
• Founding years for In-N-Out (1948, Baldwin Park), Apple Pan (1947), Hawkins (1939) are widely cited; Hawkins’ 1939 founding by James Henry Hawkins is confirmed on its Wikipedia page.