Hamburgers tend to adhere to a tried-and-true culinary equation. At the nucleus of a burger is a ground-beef patty (or two), topped with assorted accoutrements — lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese, pickles, bacon, over-easy eggs, etc. — sandwiched between either side of a bun. If a burger isn’t made with beef, it typically boasts a modifier like “turkey” or “veggie” (not sure what happens if you have a “ham” burger) and if it isn’t in a bun, restaurants will generally use a phrase like “bun-less” or “low-carb” to describe the burger’s condition.
But within those parameters, building a burger is a bit like shopping for toothpaste. An almost overwhelming amount of variations on the same general concept can be achieved by substituting slightly different ingredients — switch up the sauce and cheese combo from a standard squirt of ketchup and slice of American and you get an entirely different flavor profile.
And each restaurant that puts a burger on its menu seems to want to excel at either a damn good basic or to push the limits of our understanding of the meat sandwich to extremes, trying to achieve ultimate flavor artistry (or ~insanity~).
With that in mind, this Burger Issue tips its hat to local restaurants that have captured the hearts and stomachs of the people, featuring the best burger joints as voted by CityBeat readers in the 2019 Best Of Cincinnati issue. It also includes our readers’ favorite top 10 veggie burgers and top neighborhood-specific burger spots, as well as a handful of staff picks sprinkled in (because we just can’t keep our opinions to ourselves).
