Dining Out: Smash-burger odyssey finds its winner in a Little Italy parking lot

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Edinburger
1 Springfield Rd., edinburger.ca

Pearson Street Smash Burgers N’ Melts
8 Blais St., Embrun, pearsonstreetsmashburgers.ca

Smash Daddy
298 Preston St., smashdaddy.ca
Note: only accepts cash and e-transfers

Smash Burgers Ottawa
11-2285c St. Laurent Blvd.

A few weeks ago in this space, I mentioned that when it comes to hamburgers, smash burgers are my jam.

Not that I’ve tried the 30-plus kinds of burgers found on Wikipedia’s lists of hamburgers, from the “50/50” burger to the “Jucy Lucy” to the “Slopper.” Still, I know my tastes well enough to say that the smash-burger style of burger, which calls for patties to be flattened and deeply browned, delivers textural and flavour-related pleasures that I find simply unbeatable.

Naturally, the question follows: Which Ottawa burger purveyor makes my favourite smash burger?

In the last little while, I’ve paid as many burger-joint visits as my colon would allow in search of an answer.

I will spare you the suspense and name my winner — the Smash Daddy food truck on Preston Street — before nitpicking with respect to its peers, which all made enjoyable, if not-quite-as-good, burgers.

Smash Daddy, which opened two months ago, consistently made burgers that knocked me out. Most obviously, the patties were smashed to an almost exaggerated extent, so that flaps of deliciously browned beef, which are the first things I happily gnaw on, hang out beyond the confines of the bun. There’s no greater example of the culinary magic called the Maillard reaction, in which a hard sear imparts complex, robust flavours to a piece of meat. The Smash Daddy smash burger’s crisp, enjoyable texture was a big, big bonus.

But that’s not all. At Smash Daddy, they’ve cracked to code to make a burger that’s better than the sum of its parts.

The beef  — halal, AAA antibiotic- and hormone-free Canadian grass-fed beef, with a Wagyu option available for profligate spenders — is well-seasoned with garlic salt and pepper, I’m told, before masterful trowel-work turns balls of meat into flattened delicacies. Thinly sliced onions add their goodness as they are cooked with the beef, in what’s known as the Oklahoma style of smash burger-ing.

Smash Daddy makes its own pickles and sauces, and its cheese and buns are beyond reproach, so that the final, assembled result is an awe-inspiring burger of not just balanced proportions and flavours but also impressive structural integrity (meaning that its components seem practically fused together and it doesn’t threaten to disintegrate and land in your lap as you eat it).

Wielding the trowels in the truck is Hoa Le, who previously had the Vietnamese restaurant Pho Hoa Nam in Barrhaven. For him, Smash Daddy is a great food-business second act.

I will say that I’ve compared the $24 Wagyu Daddy to the $13 Smash Daddy, admittedly at home after a 15-minute drive, and I couldn’t discern a meaningful difference between two very crave-worthy burgers. Le’s son, Richard Nguyen, says the Wagyu burger is a little gamier.

Let me add that the optimal Smash Daddy experience is to enjoy the truck’s food — its fries are also very good — at one of the picnic tables beside the truck, or at least in the parking lot. If you need to find me this summer, odds are I’ll be there.

After multiple Smash Daddy burgers, I wondered about other smash burgers in Ottawa. Could they match Smash Daddy’s greatness?

While I enjoyed smash burgers elsewhere, I always had quibbles.

I drove to Embrun, about a half-hour southeast of Ottawa, to try burgers at Pearson Street Smash Burgers N’ Melts, a well-regarded food truck that opened three years ago.

While Smash Daddy is laser-focused on the Oklahoma variant of smash burger, Pearson Street offers, in addition to a basic iteration, four distinctively garnished variations, from a pesto-and-goat-cheese burger to a mushroom-Swiss cheeseburger to a spicier, jalapeno-spiked burger to a horseradish-and-truffle aioli burger.

We tried the original smash burger ($13.50 for a double) and the horseradish truffle burger ($16.50), which both starred Canadian Black Angus ground chuck and potato buns. The burgers were good, but they were also less smashed and less seasoned than Smash Daddy’s superlative burgers, and they were a little sloppier to handle, dripping sauce as we ate them.

At Edinburger, which opened last September in New Edinburgh, a smash burger ($11) is on the menu as well as more conventional grilled burgers. Here the smash burgers made from grass-fed Enright Cattle Co. beef were quite good and nicely garnished, although again the patties were not as smashed as Smash Daddy’s patties. As at Pearson Street, the meat-to-bun ratio seemed to tilt just a bit more toward the bread, too.

Edinburger, it should be noted, is an actual, attractive, diner-style burger joint with seating and even milkshakes, beer and cocktails available. Its fries were excellent, massive but clearly double-fried to achieve crisp exteriors and pillowy interiors.

I also visited Smash Burgers Ottawa, which is a takeout-only kitchen tucked away in a St-Laurent Boulevard industrial park and which is also known as the Sandwich Stop.

The smash burger there ($9.29 for a single, $13.27 for a double) was made from a house blend of ground brisket and chuck, which I think made for extra juiciness beneath an admirable hard sear. But this burger was possibly the saltiest of those that I tried, and the bun was nothing to write home about. The burger was also more casually garnished, and it lacked the cohesion of a Smash Daddy burger.

This survey is far from exhaustive, as by this week I’d exhausted my digestive system with my smash burger odyssey.

But there is quite likely an excellent, if pricey, smash burger on the lunch menu at Fraser in New Edinburgh, and I’m told that Burger n’ Fries Forever on Bank Street, which I quite liked years ago, now smashes burgers whereas before it simply grilled them.

Surely there are other examples out there too. Perhaps my smash burger crawl needs to resume later this year.

phum@postmedia.com