Burger boss George Motz has tasted belly bombs from all over but settled on Korzo’s Hungarian rhapsody. (
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Burger boss George Motz has tasted belly bombs from all over but settled on Korzo’s Hungarian rhapsody. (
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New York is a venerated burger city, known for classic patties served in tin-roofed pubs, for truffle-stuffed cutlets dusted with flakes of gold. But according to a new Travel Channel series, one of the city’s best burgers is hiding out in a Brooklyn goulash joint, wrapped in Hungarian flatbread and deep-fried.
“We decided to go off the deep end,” says George Motz, host of “Burger Land,” a state-by-state and city-by-city odyssey in search of the country’s best hamburgers, which premieres April 15 at 10. Korzo, an Eastern European gastropub on South Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, will be featured on the NYC episode alongside hamburger stalwarts like JG Melon on the Upper East Side, Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village, and Donovan’s in Woodside, Queens.
“Here are these three classics, here is one in the complete opposite direction,” says Motz, a widely regarded burger expert and producer and director of the film “Hamburger America,” which inspired the new TV series.
The Korzo burger is topped with apple-smoked bacon, pickled celery and Polish cheese before it is wrapped in langos, a Hungarian fried flatbread. Then, the whole thing is flash-fried until it has the doughy consistency of “a zeppole without the sugar,” says Dave “Rev” Ciancio, a Manhattan bar owner and burger fanatic who first brought Motz to Korzo.
Traditional it’s not.
“People live in New York City because they want infinite choices — nobody likes to be tied down to one thing,” says Ciancio, who founded NY Burger Week last year and is holding the second annual event from May 1 to 7. “LA wants to call itself a burger town, and they certainly are, but they’re a one-concept town. New York is an every-concept burger town.”
Korzo’s owner, Otto Zizak, a native of the former Czechoslovakia, is an unlikely hamburger artiste. After he opened Korzo five years ago serving such Central European fare as spatzle, goulash and pirogi, customers suggested he and his wife, the chef Maria Zizak, add a more casual item.
“So we said OK, let’s at least make it interesting,” Zizak says. “It’s basically a marriage of two things — one is a traditional Eastern European dough and the other one is an American hamburger… So we kind of put the two together. It’s a very popular item — we’ve developed a bit of notoriety.”
Korzo’s burger has been discovered before — the Village Voice named the version at its East Village outpost, Korzo Haus, the best burger of 2011, but Motz says though he lives a few blocks from Korzo in Park Slope, but hadn’t eaten at the restaurant until recently. The other restaurants featured in his New York episode are more well-known — on the show, he visits JG Melon with Upper East Sider Mayor Bloomberg.
“Bloomberg doesn’t play favorites like I do — well, neither one of us plays favorites — but it’s definitely his go-to burger,” Motz says. “It’s also a fact that they don’t play favorites in that place. He doesn’t get special treatment.”
Motz insists his show is not a contest, but when it comes to a hotly debated topic like this one, how could it not be?
“There’s a home-team pride — ‘This is my burger, this is the way it’s supposed to be,’” says J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, of Serious Eats, whose personal favorites include the burgers at Shake Shack and the Spotted Pig. “It’s something everybody can eat, everybody can afford. Everybody has so many opinions on it.”