🍔 The History of the Smash Burger

Updated July 2026

The smash burger feels like a recent trend, but the core technique — pressing a ball of beef hard onto a hot flat-top to maximize the browned crust — is old diner and short-order cooking, and there is nothing to invent about it. What is genuinely new is the name, the fact that entire restaurants are now built around a single cooking motion, and the reason the style came back after decades of the industry moving in the opposite direction. That last part is the interesting question, and it has answers in economics as much as in taste.

Old technique, new name

Griddle cooks have smashed patties for a very long time, because a thin, hard-pressed patty cooks fast and develops a deep, crisp crust through the Maillard reaction. Regional traditions like the Oklahoma fried-onion burger, which presses shredded onion into a thin patty on a griddle, show the smash idea living in American cooking well before the term "smash burger" existed. In El Reno, Oklahoma the practice is generally dated to the Depression era, when onion was cheap and beef was not.

Note what that means: the smash burger has no inventor and does not need one. Pressing meat flat on hot metal to cook it faster is not a recipe, it is what a short-order cook does when there is a line at the counter.

The commercial thread, and what can be verified

Between the Depression-era regional burgers and the modern boom, the technique survived in diners, drive-ins and lunch counters without anyone naming it. Food writers frequently trace a mid-20th-century Kentucky drive-in tradition of smashing patties with a purpose-built press — the account most often repeated points to Ashland, Kentucky in the 1950s — but the details vary from telling to telling, and we have not been able to confirm a single documented first use. Treat it as a commonly cited account rather than settled history.

The part that is straightforwardly documented is recent and corporate: from the mid-2000s onward, restaurant companies began naming themselves after the technique and building menus entirely around it. A chain called Smashburger, commonly reported as founded in Denver, Colorado in 2007, is the clearest marker of the moment the method stopped being a kitchen shortcut and became a brand category. Company founding records and contemporary trade coverage are the place to verify those specifics.

Why smashing works

Smashing forces the maximum amount of beef against the maximum amount of hot metal. More contact means more browning, and browning is flavor. The trade-off is that you smash once, early, in the first thirty seconds — before the proteins set and while the ball is still loose enough to spread.

The persistent objection is that smashing squeezes out the juice, and it is half right. Pressing a patty that has already begun to cook does exactly that, which is why pressing on a grilling patty is a genuine mistake. Smashing a raw, cold, loose ball is a different operation: the meat spreads rather than being wrung out, and what juice does escape lands on the griddle and turns into crust. See our smash burger guide for the method.

Why it came back: the economics

The revival makes more sense from the kitchen side than the dining side. A quarter-inch patty is done in two to three minutes; a thick pub patty needs eight or more plus resting time, and a probe to know when. On a fixed griddle, thin patties mean far more covers per hour, and the cooking time is short enough that a burger can be made to order instead of held.

The style also flatters cheap beef. Smashing wants 80/20 chuck — the fat is the point, since it renders against the surface and crisps the edges — so the technique turns the least expensive grind into its best version rather than requiring a premium one. And the capital cost of opening is low: a flat-top, a press, a stiff turner. Food journalists have repeatedly connected that low barrier to entry to the wave of smash-burger pop-ups, ghost kitchens and market stalls that followed, in a period when full restaurant build-outs were hard to finance.

Why it came back: the culture

The 1990s and 2000s had pushed the American burger in the other direction — thicker, taller, prized for a pink interior and served medium-rare in "gourmet pub" form. The smash burger is a direct reaction to that. It abandons interior doneness as a variable entirely (a patty this thin cannot be cooked rare, so the argument disappears) and relocates all the pleasure to the crust.

Two other things helped. Short-form video rewards a food that finishes in three minutes and looks dramatic doing it — the hiss, the lacy brown edge, the cheese pull are all built into the method. And outdoor flat-top griddles became affordable domestic equipment during the same period, so home cooks could finally reproduce the surface a smash burger actually needs, which a home stove and a thin pan cannot deliver.

What the revival actually changed

Not the technique — that is unchanged since the lunch counter. What changed is that a nameless shortcut acquired a name, a name became a menu category, and a menu category became a thing home cooks buy equipment for. The smash burger is now one of the few cooking methods that most people learned from a screen rather than from a cook, which is a genuinely new way for a food tradition to travel.