Hamburger Architecture

We’ve all been burned by a poorly constructed burger. You know what I mean: the “How do I pick this thing up?” burger, or the burger overflowing with absurd amounts of mismatched condiments. There’s also the burger that my friend the food writer Adam Kuban calls the “backslider”: a burger whose bun is so hard that the pressure from your first bite causes the contents to slide out the back and onto the plate (or your lap). I’ve had the misfortune of trying to eat burgers with cold cheese, oversized buns, and limp lettuce and have slogged my way through over-sauced burgers on disintegrating, untoasted, undersize buns. Bad burger architecture is inexcusable and easily avoidable.