Shhhhh. It’s The Secret Smash Society.
It consists of three chefs: Harrison Downing, chef/sandwich artist at Greys Fine Cheese; Schuyler O’Brien, who is in culinary operations at City Silo Table + Pantry; and Cole Jeanes, chef/owner of Kinfolk restaurant.
They sell smash burgers at pop-ups, which are supposedly secret, but they’re not. They post the locations a few weeks in advance at The Secret Smash Society on Instagram. “The secret is where we’re going to be next,” Downing says.
The pop-ups usually are held at breweries or other places that don’t have a kitchen. They set up their flat-top and get to work.
A smash burger is just what it sounds like. “It’s a cheeseburger,” Jeanes says. “We do two patties, three ounces each. The smash comes from a burger press. You smash it until it’s completely flat. The idea is to get as much surface area as possible. It’s thin and crusty. It’s all about texture.”
“It’s a faster cook time,” Downing says. “The fat goes back in the meat ’cause it doesn’t have time to render out.”
Their beef is from Home Place Pastures in Como, Mississippi. “We use Martin’s potato roll,” Jeanes says. “It’s a four-inch roll.”
“We toast that,” Downing says. “It’s three-ounce patties with cheese, Kraft singles. Classy. It’s got to be Kraft singles.” The pickles have to be “on the bottom. I’m a big advocate of pickles, lettuce, tomato, and really finely shaved onion.”
They then add what they call their Daddy’s Sauce — “a burger sauce we make. Duke’s mayo-based sauce, ketchup, mustard, Worcestershire. It’s similar to a Big Mac sauce.”
Downing describes their smash burger as “a sophisticated Big Mac.” The hamburger comes with a bag of potato chips. But only one kind. “I’m a classic Lays man,” he says.
They don’t know of anybody else in Memphis doing a smash burger. “We just decided to hop into it.”
The first Secret Smash Society pop-up was at High Cotton Brewing Company. “We had a lot more people there than we expected,” Downing says. “And they were ready to go the second Cole threw that first piece of meat on the flat-top.
“It helped that we all cooked in kitchens before and were able to verbalize and not look up, keep our heads down, and keep going. Schuyler, being the experienced guy he is, talked us to where we were supposed to be. We would have been in rough waters if he wasn’t there.”
“I think we hit around 120 [burgers] ’cause we had a little meat left over,” Jeanes says. “We ran 120 to 150 in two hours, two patties each. My arm was pretty much numb by the time we got done.”
Using a burger press, they pressed “about 300 burger balls,” Downing says. “It’s a handheld piece of metal that’s flat. And you just make sure that it’s greased up.”
The first pop-up was a hit. “People really loved it. Within a week after, I had almost every brewery reaching out wanting us to do one there.”
They’d like to do pop-ups “ideally, once a month,” Downing says. They all have their own work schedules, but, he says, “I think we’re moving toward getting more on the books.”
The next pop-up will be September 4th at The Hill Country Boucherie at Home Place Pastures.
In addition to sharing a love of cooking, O’Brien and Jeanes are fathers of new baby boys. Downing and his wife are expecting a baby boy in October. “Right after our first one was when Luca was born,” says O’Brien, who refers to their shared experience of fatherhood and starting their smash burger pop-ups as “the battle of the babies. We’re learning how to do all this while we’re all living the dad life.”
“Schuyler went ahead and coined our new name as The Patty Daddies,” Downing says.
Find @thesecretsmashsociety on Instagram to book a pop-up.
Michael Donahue