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The Patty Melt Is Tired of Hearing About Your Favorite Burger We patty-melt people will always be outnumbered by the hamburger people, and we know it. The burger is pillowy, rounded and voluptuous. The patty melt is starchy, angled and flat. The burger is popular the way vanilla ice cream is popular. The patty melt, popular with a small minority, is black raspberry. It is the pumpernickel bagel. The Boston cream doughnut. The Trefoil cookie. Recipe: The Commerce Inn Patty Melt Burgers, which conquered the United States long ago, win over new parts of the world every day. Social media chatters about viral smashburgers and 80/20 chef burgers dry-aged for months. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The patty melt is an also-ran at home. Abroad, it is virtually unknown. You rarely hear about an innovative one. I could order a patty melt at any diner tonight and get something almost indistinguishable from the first patty melts I ate as a boy. Neither do you often hear about new places to eat them. Those of us who like the sandwich resigned ourselves a long time ago to enjoying it at the same lunch counters and coffee shops where we have always gone to find it. Something odd has been going on around New York City, though. Out of nowhere, Daily Provisions, the local chain of cafes best known for crullers and bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, added a patty melt to its limited menu early last year. The Commerce Inn, a West Village restaurant that explores vintage American farmhouse cooking, has started making the sandwich, too. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT You can order a patty melt with a cherry lime rickey at S & P Lunch, an affectionate revival of a traditional lunch counter across Fifth Avenue from the Flatiron Building. You can have one with an egg cream at Revelie, a luncheonette with French leanings that has been operating in SoHo since last spring. ImageDiners at a counter face the flattop, where a cook in a blue cap and black gloves is at work. George Motz, the owner of Hamburger America, makes an off-menu patty melt variant called the Chester.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times And you can get something very closely resembling a patty melt at Hamburger America, the new SoHo restaurant opened by the professional burgerologist George Motz. True, it’s not on the menu, and you can’t just order a patty melt, either. But if you ask for a Chester, Mr. Motz will make one for you all the same. He will use two slices of American cheese and two slices of white bread, but no fried onions, which for some melt mavens will be a deal breaker. For those of us who have been eating patty melts for years, seeing all these new versions is both gratifying and disconcerting. I look at it the way I view the sudden popularity of the mystic jazz harpist Alice Coltrane since her music figured prominently in the series “The Curse”: It’s exciting, it’s overdue and I absolutely did not see it coming. Stranger still, these new patty melts are selling faster than anyone expected. When it appeared this summer, the one at the Commerce Inn was served only after 10 p.m. in the narrow, tapering barroom. Word got out, and now you can have it anytime, no matter where you are sitting. Daily Provisions started cautiously, too, unveiling it last January as a dinner item. By December, it had charmed its way onto the lunch menu. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The patty melt has stood patiently in the shadow of the hamburger for so long that resistance to the ebb and flow of fashion seems to be baked into its being. It is resistant to change in general. Its classic components are few: bread, usually rye; cheese that melts well; browned onions; and, of course, a beef patty. Take one away, or add something else, and the thing you end up with may not be a patty melt. Use a plant-based patty instead of beef and you’ve got a vegan patty melt. Substitute goat cheese for Swiss or American, though, and all hell breaks loose. Image A pickle spear lounges atop a patty melt on a bar. Close at hand is a mug of beer. Many versions were tested before the Commerce Inn settled on its recipe. Jody Williams, an owner, said, “It’s simple, but it’s not easy.”Credit...Nico Schinco for The New York Times The biggest difference between burgers and patty melts is that burgers have buns and patty melts have bread. Not everyone agrees; there are those who argue that a patty melt is a subspecies of burger. I think, though, that the sandwich shares more with the grilled cheese than it does with a burger on a bun. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT I used to believe rye bread was mandatory, until I learned that the first patty melts were made on sourdough. Whoa! William Wallace Naylor, known to everyone as Tiny, originated the sandwich in the 1940s at Tiny’s Waffle Shop on Powell Street in San Francisco, one of a chain of restaurants he owned in the Bay Area. Rye didn’t enter the picture until several years later, when Mr. Naylor moved to Southern California and founded Tiny Naylor’s, a string of coffee shops that had Googie architecture and, in some locations, roller-skating waitresses. “The sourdough wasn’t as good down here and rye was more popular,” his granddaughter Jennifer Naylor said. The new sandwich required several square feet of cooking surface, as you know if you have ever tried to caramelize onions, sear a beef patty and toast two slices of bread in a single skillet on your stovetop. Ms. Naylor, a chef herself, used to make patty melts on a flattop at Granita, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant in Malibu. She still griddles them for catering jobs and intends to griddle them at the tavern she is getting ready to open in Montrose, Calif. As she pointed out, cooking everything together on a hot griddle allows the butter, sweet onions, beef juices and melting cheese to rub and slide against one another. I think this helps bind not just the ingredients but also their flavors, so that a patty melt, by the time it is done, fuses into a single unit, complete and satisfying, and not easy to dress up with microgreens, roasted tomatoes or other foreign objects. Besides, these might slip out as you ate the sandwich. One hallmark of a patty melt, a trait that distinguishes it from a burger, is that it can maintain its structural integrity from start to finish. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Image A bearded person leans against the counter of a restaurant. David Honeysett, an owner of Revelie Luncheonette, uses seeded sourdough rye for his patty melts.Credit...Nico Schinco for The New York Times Image A patty melt sits on a counter next to crinkle-cut fries and an ice cream drink with whipped cream and a cherry on top. “Even though so many of the ingredients are the same as a burger, it turns into a thing unto itself,” said Mr. Honeysett.Credit...Nico Schinco for The New York Times “Even though so many of the ingredients are the same as a burger, it turns into a thing unto itself,” said David Honeysett, the chef and a partner at Revelie. Mr. Honeysett, who prefers patty melts, makes his on seeded sourdough rye, neatly uniting the two eras of Tiny Naylor’s career. Meet The Times’s Restaurant Critic Pete Wells talks about his approach to reviewing restaurants and what keeps him excited about it after 10 years on the job. Pete Wells’s Search for the Perfect Bite July 13, 2022 A patty melt should look plain. It’s part of the gestalt, along with a certain messiness. Maybe beef juices won’t run down your arms the way they do when you eat a medium-rare hamburger, but they might. At the very least, your plate should be spattered with droplets of melted cheese and grease. A well-lubricated patty melt is a better patty melt. Two of my favorites, the ones at Daily Provisions and the Commerce Inn, are made by mixing beef fat into lean meat in a ratio of one to four. (Most places use meat grinders, but the Commerce Inn chops the meat with a knife, which increases the pleasure of rolling each bite around in your mouth.) The added fat makes the sandwich juicier. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT So do the different mayonnaise-based condiments each place spreads between the slices of bread — a spicy version of Thousand Island dressing at Daily Provisions and a simple Dijon mayonnaise at the Commerce Inn. S & P Lunch slides some Russian dressing into its melts. If a traditional patty melt calls for lemonade or root beer, these drippy, loaded melts might be more at home with a beer or a Bloody Mary. “It’s a very popular weekend sandwich, if you catch my drift,” said Claudia Fleming, the executive culinary director of Daily Provisions, who came up with the recipe. “Late morning. It’s a good thing to set you straight after a wild night.” Maybe it’s the square footage of flattop space required by patty melts that has kept them in the hands of short-order cooks and out of the hands of chefs. Or it could be the simplicity of the thing. You have to look at a patty melt very hard to find things to change. One chef who did just that is Alex Stupak. His efforts to re-engineer the sandwich may be seen as a cautionary tale. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Last year, when he opened Mischa, the Midtown restaurant that serves as his essay on the theme of American food, he was determined, perversely, not to serve burgers. Instead, he offered a vegetarian patty melt. The bread was marbled rye, the cheese was American and the patty was made of mushrooms. The dripping richness of beef fat was mimicked by an emulsion of mushroom tea and de-aromatized coconut fat. A bit of methyl cellulose bound it all together. This patty was remarkable in every way, delicious, unexpectedly juicy and ingenious. But then, as people who test boundaries often do, Mr. Stupak went too far. He made the patty and the marbled rye round in shape, and about the size of a burger. And he served the sandwich open-faced, with lettuce, raw onions, sliced pickles, mayonnaise and ketchup on the side. Demand was underwhelming. People asked for real burgers. By the end of the year, Mr. Stupak yanked the mushroom patty melt from the menu. “I’m realizing now that what I did might have been an odd hybrid,” he wrote in a text message. “Patty melts aren’t built to be opened up and augmented with the stuff I was serving on the side.” ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Listening to popular demand, he now offers a regular beef burger on a bun and a veggie burger made with the mushroom patty. And, as of last week, Mischa is serving a retooled mushroom patty melt. The bread is a sourdough Pullman, the cheese is Swiss, the caramelized onions are back. It is not open-faced. A pickle spear is the only accessory. It has to be the finest meatless patty melt in the city. It probably won’t outsell the burger. But if you like patty melts, you knew that already. The Commerce Inn 50 Commerce Street (Barrow Street), West Village; no phone. Daily Provisions 103 East 19th Street (Park Avenue), Gramercy; 646-503-4440; and other locations. Hamburger America 51 Macdougal Street (Houston Street), SoHo; 646-707-0497. Mischa 157 East 53rd Street (Lexington Avenue), Midtown; 212-466-6381. Revelie Luncheonette 179 Prince Street (Sullivan Street), SoHo; 212-696-1917. S & P Lunch 174 Fifth Avenue (West 22nd Street), Flatiron district; 212-691-8862. Save the Recipe COOKING The Commerce Inn Patty Melt Jan. 28, 2024 Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. Pete Wells has been the restaurant critic for The Times since 2012. He was previously the editor of the Food section. More about Pete Wells A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 31, 2024, Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Messy Bit-Player Sandwich That’s Sneaking to Center Stage. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe