"So who really has the best smash burger in Miami?" People ask us that across the counter about ten times a week, usually while holding a tray of our food. Which makes it a loaded question. The honest answer is that we think about it constantly, and the only way to answer it with a straight face is to go eat everyone else's.
So that's what we did. Five smash burgers. Four of them cooked by other people. Paid for with our own money, no phone calls ahead, no "hey, we're in the industry." Here's how it went.
A tasting is only useful if the rules are boring and strict, so ours were:
If you want the long version of how we think about those four things, we've written it out in our guide to what separates a real smash burger from a pub patty. This piece is the field test.
You can't write about smash burgers in this city and skip Cowy. They're not a rumour; they have the hardware. Local news site WhatNow Miami reports that Cowy's burger was named "Very Best Burger" at the 2024 South Beach Wine & Food Festival Burger Bash, and The Infatuation has them rated 8.5 at the top of its Miami smashburger rankings.
What they do well: confidence. The build is loud — bacon jam, grilled onions, house sauce — and it commits. Nothing in it is apologising. The edges on ours had that proper ragged lace where the beef has been pressed right out to the steel and left alone long enough to catch.
Our honest note, as people who cook this stuff: a lot of the talking is done by the toppings. That's not a criticism so much as a style. Sweet jam and soft onions are a very easy thing to love, and Cowy loves them well. It's just a different project from ours, where we want the beef to be the loudest thing on the bun.
On price, Axios Miami's review listed the Cowy Burger at $14.95 when they ate in December 2024 — a reported price from that visit, not a current quote, so check before you go.
Redondos is the spot people mention when they're tired of the 1950s-diner version of a burger. It's a Bird Road shop with a Latin-leaning menu, and the burger it's known for puts goat cheese on a smashed patty, which sounds like a stunt and isn't.
What they do well: flavour combinations that nobody else in the city is running. Goat cheese is tangy and it cuts fat, so the burger stays bright further into it than a double American-cheese build usually does. The patties are genuinely thin, which is the whole point and which more places should be brave enough to do.
Our honest note: thin patties have a very short happy window. Eat it in the car park, not at home. That's true of ours too. It's the trade-off you accept the moment you choose crust over a thick, pink middle.
Up on Collins, away from the mainland crowd. Big Joe's is best known for a cheeseburger served on a glazed donut, which is the kind of thing that normally makes us roll our eyes, and then you eat it and you're quiet for a minute.
What they do well: bun work and crust. The edges were properly crisped, not merely browned, and the bread is treated like an ingredient instead of packaging. That's rarer than it should be. Most burgers in Miami are let down by a bun that's either cold or sweet in the wrong way.
Our honest note: it's a drive, and a beach-traffic drive at that. Worth it on a day you were going to be over there anyway. Not worth it at 8pm on a Friday when you're hungry in Edgewater.
We're not naming names to be rude about it, and you already know which one we mean: the national smash-style chain with the potato bun and the sauce. We included it on purpose, because it's the baseline nearly everyone's palate is calibrated to.
What they do well: consistency, which is much harder than people who've never run a kitchen understand. Same burger, same bun, same sauce, in every city, at 11am and at 10pm. That's an enormous achievement of systems.
Our honest note: repeatability and maximum crust pull in opposite directions. The hottest, hardest press — the one that gives you the lacy brown shell — is also the one that punishes a half-second of inattention. A chain can't gamble a half-second across hundreds of stores, so it pulls back. You get a reliable burger with a gentle, even sear instead of a craggy one. Fair trade for them. Not the trade we want to make.
Rating your own burger in your own blog post is a magic trick nobody falls for, so we won't. We'll just tell you exactly what's in it and let you do the maths.
The beef is 100% grass-fed and American Wagyu, cut fresh in-house — never a frozen puck out of a box. It goes onto the flat top as a ball and gets pressed hard in the first few seconds, once, and then left alone. We cook in Wagyu beef tallow instead of seed oils, which is also what the tallow fries go into, and which is the single biggest reason our crust smells like beef rather than like a fryer. There's more on that in our post on why we fry in beef fat instead of oil.
The OG Smash is the plain one and the cheapest thing on the board — it's the burger we'd want judged. The Truffle Wagyu and the Philly Cheese Smash sit at the top end if you want something louder, and the shakes and floats are spun by hand, one at a time. Current prices are all on our menu.
Here's the part of a head-to-head that nobody does properly. Price isn't a tiebreaker you apply at the end. It changes what the burger is for.
A fifteen-dollar burger is an event. You plan around it, you park for it, you probably go once a month. A single-digit burger is a habit — it's the thing you eat on a Tuesday because you didn't feel like cooking. Both are legitimate. They are just not competing for the same slot in your week, and ranking them against each other as if they were is how most "best of" lists go wrong.
Every spot on this list is doing good work. The question isn't which one is objectively best — it's which one you can actually afford to eat as often as you want to eat it. We've put real numbers to that question in our breakdown of what you really get for the money under $15.
The useful answer is by occasion:
That's the test. Run it on us too — we'd rather you held us to it than took our word for anything. You'll find the griddle at 2925 Biscayne Blvd, open from 11am every day and running to 2am on Friday and Saturday, or you can order ahead on Toast and skip the queue.
Order the OG Smash, single, no additions. Then come tell us where we placed.
Grass-fed and American Wagyu, cut fresh in-house daily, smashed to order and crisped in wagyu tallow. 2925 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33137. Open from 11am every day, late on Friday and Saturday.
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