Illustration: Sarah Kilcoyne
Whenever he has a memorable meal, burger expert George Motz snaps a photo. That way, if someone asks for, say, a lunch place in Tokyo, he can search through a years-spanning archive of Google photos for a recommendation. It’s about as fastidious as you’d expect from Motz as a food lover and documentarian. His restaurant, Hamburger America, opened in late 2023, and an updated version of his book of the same name, a state-by-state burger-restaurant guide, came out earlier this year. His obsession with food, though, first came out of necessity. In his early teens, Motz was often in charge of feeding his siblings while his mother worked nights. She taught him recipes and made it look easy. Staples like peanut butter or granola were always homemade — not that he always appreciated it. “I was the kid at school with the drippy bag of some homemade bread with homemade preserves leaking through,” he says. “I was like, ‘I want a Fluffernutter.’”
Monday, May 25
I wake up at 7:30 and have coffee before biking my usual loop around my neighborhood. I come back and have breakfast, which is another cup of coffee, a fried egg, and one piece of buttered white toast.
I love fried eggs, and I try to have one every day. I can make and eat one with toast within three minutes. I like to cook them over easy so I can dip the toast into the leftover runny egg on the plate. My mom grew up in the South, and I have a lot of southern relatives who do the same thing. Lately, I’ve been adding this sambal goreng chili topping on the egg, made by some friends in L.A. at Bungkus Bagus. It’s fried shallots, chili powder, garlic, and salt, and it’s one of the greatest condiments I’ve ever had.
I try to be at the restaurant every day for a few hours, so around midday, I head over there and have a double cheeseburger. The lunch crowd is so much fun — it’s a mix of fans, people who just want a hamburger, and regulars. I didn’t expect to have regulars so soon, and I’ve become friends with some of them. We have their phone numbers, so if they don’t show up for a day or two, we call them to be like, “Are you okay?” I really love the neighborhood in general. I can walk around and wave to people who have shops that have been there forever. I feel like I’ve been there forever too, but I’m the new guy. Around the corner, Thompson Alchemists has a bluegrass and country band play at the store every other Tuesday or so. I try to get there as much as possible to watch the old-timers dancing on the sidewalk.
It’s my girlfriend Dee’s birthday, so after the shift ends, I drive to ABC Kitchens in Dumbo. I’ve been in the car constantly, because I’m always hauling stuff: coolers and bread, posters and menus. We don’t have any markings on the car, but people know it’s me because my license plate is HMBRGR.
I meet Dee; my daughter, Ruby; and my son, Mac, for our 6 p.m. reservation. We wanted to get there on the early side, because we knew we’d be getting a lot of food. And we do — half the menu, and the food is spectacular. It stands out because it’s the greatest hits from all the other Jean-Georges restaurants, like the celeriac francese from Four Twenty Five, the incredible sundae from ABC Kitchen, and the burger from The Fulton, with a few other things added in as well.
We get the market table, which is 16 vegetable items. Even though I’m obviously a meat lover, I could eat off of just that menu. I really like the kohlrabi, which has a chili-garlic dressing, and the broccoli, which is dusted with pistachios. We also get the campo grande pork chop. Before it even comes to the table, I tell everyone that I’m getting the bone. Chewing the bone is one of the greatest experiences you can have — so base and primal and perfect. When it arrives, I sit there and gnaw on the bone like an animal.
We get all of the desserts, including the sundae, which is off the charts. It’s a crazy texture-flavor combination of salty and sweet, with chocolate sauce and caramel corn and peanuts. They send out Champagne for Dee’s birthday, along with some other items. We can’t figure out how to make room in our bellies, so we take stuff home, which I’m very happy about. I’m a big fan of leftovers.
Tuesday, May 26
Same routine as yesterday: Wake up at 7:30, coffee, bike, then another cup of coffee with a fried egg and sambal goreng, but with a pan-fried tortilla from Tacombi’s tortilla line, Vista Hermosa. It’s really delicious. Personally, I think the best flour tortilla is from the restaurant Border Town. They used to sell them at pop-ups, but now with the brick-and-mortar open, I haven’t seen them sell just the tortillas anymore. The next best thing, though, is Vista Hermosa.
My daughter says that I take my coffee like a teenage girl, which is to say that I love half-and-half. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t know why, but I’ve also become obsessed with coffee from Tim Hortons. The problem is that it’s hard to find, and I refuse to spend too much money buying it online. Instead, I drive out to the Tim Hortons in a gas station off the Horace Harding Expressway to buy four or five tubs at a time. When they see me, they know why I’m there.
For lunch, I go to the restaurant for a tuna-salad sandwich to mix it up. Sometimes a customer will see me not eating a hamburger at my own restaurant and comment on it. They’ll be like, “Oh, tuna today?” When I’m there, it’s impossible to hide. The other day, we were testing a burger, and while I was trying to sneak a bite of it, I looked up and saw a guy standing in the doorway. He snapped a photo and walked out the door, and it was on Instagram five minutes later.
I come home to prep dinner for my family, which I try to make three or four times a week. It’s a good time right now, because I’ve been home for a longer stretch than usual, and both of my kids are back from school. Tonight, my son requested my “cheesy chicken” for dinner. It’s the world’s stupidest recipe, but it’s ridiculously good. I made it up back when my kids were young, maybe in the single digits. They were hungry and I had to make something quickly, so I literally cut up chicken strips, threw them on a sheet pan, covered them with cheese, and put them in the oven. It worked, and they loved it. I started to perfect it — if you could call it that — by putting down parchment paper, then Parmesan, and then a seasoning, and then the chicken strips, with more cheese on top. You bake it for 15 minutes, and it’s magic.
For sides, I make a simple cucumber salad, which entails slicing tiny cucumbers on a mandolin and throwing them into a seasoned rice-wine vinegar and sesame oil dressing. I also make white rice in a rice cooker and mix in butter, salt, and sautéed onions. Both of these are favorites from their childhood, and I’m glad they enjoy them.
Wednesday, May 27
Two cups of coffee, a fried egg with sambal goreng, and a pan-fried tortilla like yesterday.
I spend the morning doing office work before eating lunch at home with my daughter. Over the weekend, I was visiting my mom in Quogue, where I grew up. I stopped by Schmidt’s Country Market, which has amazing turkey chili, and I brought it home so the kids would have something in the refrigerator. I also have everything burger buns, which is part of a collaboration I’ve been working on with Breads Bakery for The Great Nosh, a Jewish food festival on Governors Island this summer. They’re making the buns and we’re making the burgers. We’ve been testing for months, and since then, I’ve been wrapping the extra buns to throw in my freezer. I toast a few, and Ruby and I have them with the chili.
I’m off to the restaurant, and today, I’m recording an episode of Katie Lee Biegel’s YouTube show. After we wrap up, there’s still some time before dinner, so Dee meets me at the restaurant before we go to Dean’s. In the meantime, we split a burger. She’s my secret weapon for dieting. I have something called the “half-diet,” which is where you just share the other half of your meal with somebody else.
We get to Dean’s around 6:30, and the vibe is fantastic. They have Guinness on tap, which I love. The first three times we went, we just drank Guinness and didn’t eat anything. But now, we’ve been about ten times, and every time, we explore more of the menu. Tonight, we eat an enormous meal, which includes boiled ham with parsley sauce over mashed potatoes. Some of those words don’t really go together, and when you look at it, it’s jarring — but it tastes great. We also devour the bubble and squeak and the Guinness bread with Marmite butter. When it gets to our table, the people next to us see the swirl of butter on our plates and order it too.
Thursday, May 28
Two cups of coffee as usual, but no egg. Instead, I have coffee-flavored skyr with homemade granola. Most cooks like to be able to experiment and change recipes, and I do too. But I have six recipes I will never touch because they’re perfect, and my secret granola recipe is one of them. I spent the pandemic tweaking the recipe, and I’m very proud of it. During the holidays, I’ll make 70 quarts of it to hand out to friends and my entire staff.
We’re prepping for a private event on a rooftop tonight on the Upper East Side, so I get to the restaurant a little later in the day and stay until it’s time to leave for the event. Dee often helps me run private events and pop-ups — she’s in charge of making the list of things to bring, making sure things are in order, and that we have the right amount of cheese and buns and things.
In the midst of running around, we split a cheeseburger again — part of the half-diet — at some point during the afternoon. The event is at 6 p.m., so we load up and head over before then.
When we arrive, we test the burgers and also set up a deep fryer on the rooftop to make fries on location, which is pretty rare for us. Dinner ends up being the tested burgers along with food from the other caterer, Acquolina. Everything from them was amazing, especially this lemon risotto that’s actually served in a lemon. It’s a nice touch.
The party wraps up around 9 p.m., so my crew members and I pack up and drive back to the restaurant to unload. We call it the “no glory” portion of the evening.
When I get home, I have a nightcap. There’s this company that makes great aperitifs called Faccia Brutto, and I like mixing its fernet with vermouth and bitters. It’s sort of like a Boulevardier, but less sweet. I pair it with some coffee-flavored Talenti, but my wind-down is incomplete. For years, I’d watch The Late Show With Stephen Colbert before going to bed. Before that, it was Letterman for 30 years. I had the same damn routine every night when I was at home, but now, when I turn the TV on, there’s a different show.
Friday, May 29
Two cups of coffee, a fried egg with sambal goreng, and a fried tortilla before some office work and a meeting with my partners.
I work up until lunch, and then I reheat leftover sweet potatoes from ABC Kitchens, which are swimming in an amazing amount of grated butter. I repurpose more leftovers into a curry-chicken-salad sandwich on white bread, which I eat with potato chips.
Afterward, I head to the restaurant for an initial test of our next burger special, the slugburger, which is from Mississippi. The original ones were made from beef with bread crumbs in it, but slugs today are more likely to have ground pork and soy flour. We’re making the original ones, which go back a hundred years.
I take the ingredients and prep them in the basement, and then I come up to actually cook it in front of the counter. Every single time I do it, people start taking pictures and asking questions, because they know there are only three burgers on the menu at any given time. I get to tell them that this is the next one we’re testing. If someone asks me a question about it, I’ll give them that burger.
For tonight’s dinner, my son asked for potatoes au gratin, which is one of his favorite recipes. I decide that the main course will be a roast chicken, so I come home at 4:30 to get started. My son was in France last summer and brought me back some Herbes de Provençe, so I use that on top to start seasoning the chicken. I also add carrots and throw in a chopped Vidalia onion I picked up during a shoot last month in an onion field. They told us to grab whatever we wanted, so I pulled a few out of the ground and took them home. They’re enormous.
After dinner, I do some work for the restaurant, since we have a few events coming up. Once I wrap up, I make myself an actual Boulevardier, with Jaywalk rye, La Fuerza vermouth, and the Faccia Brutto aperitif. I settle in with a little bit of milk-chocolate Tony’s Chocolonely and Trader Joe’s organic peanut butter. I’m visiting family on Long Island tomorrow, but for now, I get to be home.
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