Restaurants are selling gourmet burgers so popular they have to cap orders

Some luxury restaurants in America's biggest cities are offering burgers with ingredients so premium they're limiting the number they sell at a time.

The burger at Bar Avoja in Los Angeles is made with a prime brisket patty, Tillamook cheddar, dill pickles, onion fonduta and herb rémoulade on a brioche bun, Food & Wine reported. It costs $38, and only 20 burgers are offered each Thursday.

Eddie Sanchez, known by his Instagram handle @hungrinla, posted a video of himself eating the exclusive menu item and called it "one of L.A.'s most legendary burgers."

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Chef Evan Funke created the burger for another restaurant in 2010, according to Food & Wine.

"For years, it lived on as one of those 'you had to be there' bites that L.A. food people never stopped talking about," Sanchez wrote.

Funke's creation, Sanchez wrote, predated the "smashburger wave of the 2020s, back when burgers were big, bold and unapologetically gourmet." The hype is real, Sanchez added.

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"I'm not trying to do a supreme drop or anything like that," Funke told Food & Wine. "It's honestly just constrained by the output of the kitchen."

Kitchen constraints are the reason James Beard Award-winning chef Tony Messina said his Boston restaurant, Common Craft, only serves 35 of its black-pepper cheeseburgers each night.

The menu states that the burger is made with house-ground chuck, brisket, marrow, flank, Vermont cheddar, special sauce, house pickles and a house-made bun. 

It costs $28, and there's an option to add house bacon for $4, a fried egg for $4 or foie gras for $19.

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"We put a cap on how many we have every night just because we don't want to just be a burger restaurant and, frankly, the labor involved in making this burger is gruesome, so we're trying to not kill ourselves making only burgers," Messina told Fox News Digital.

The restaurant opened with the burger on the menu, Messina said, "but we very quickly realized that we needed to put a cap on it because people were just coming in for that, and we just couldn't keep up with the demand."

Curating the meat and grinding it in-house are what make the "fun burger" labor-intensive, Messina said. He added that neither he nor his chef cut corners.

"The inspiration was not necessarily to be on trend with having a limited-time, specialty burger," Messina said. "We just wanted to make a good burger, and then we had to do what we had to do to keep up with it."

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Messina is in the process of opening another restaurant, this one in L.A., where high-end burgers seem to be all the rage. Bar 109, in East Hollywood, serves its Australian wagyu burger exclusively on Tuesdays. 

Customers can start ordering it after 8:30 p.m., according to Food & Wine.

Content creator Chad Savage said in a TikTok video of himself sampling it that it was one of the best burgers he's had in L.A., and if it weren't past 10 p.m., he would have gotten another one.

Lord's in New York only offers its $26 Welsh rarebit cheeseburgers at dinnertime.

"It's kind of a pain to make," Lord's co-owner Ed Szymanski told Food & Wine. "Also, we don't want to be known as a burger restaurant."

Szymanski said he doesn't "begrudge anyone who wants to come and eat the burger."

He added, "It's an awesome show of their commitment to dining out, but I don't think the burger should be the whole story of Lord's."