Pete Wells hangs up his feeding bag.

You probably don’t know him. He is, or was, the New York Times restaurant reviewer. He wrote the famous takedown of Guy Fieri’s abysmal tourist trap (freebie) that I linked to a couple of years ago because it was such an enjoyable train wreck to read.

Another of my faves was his write up of this smash burger joint in New York. It’s always fun to watch an artist work with the simplest of materials, and here that applies on both sides of the stainless steel serving bench.

It’s a free link so you can read the whole thing if you’re so inclined.

The undressed smash burger represents an almost geometric purity; the fried-onion burger, on the other hand, is deliriously impure. The onions cooked in beef juices combine with the beef cooked in onion juices, and together they tap into an America of cheap and slightly sleazy thrills. This burger tastes like late-night drives into empty downtowns, of cheap beer on boardwalks and wax paper at fly-by-night carnivals, of places where you talk to weird characters you wouldn’t meet in the daytime. The fast-food chains pushed all of this out of their franchises. Mr. Motz’s Oklahoma burger brings it back. It tastes like honest American grease.