Dining Out 009: Superiority Burger

Dinner in the East Village, Manhattan.

I have an announcement to make. Today is an auspicious day because it is the day that Dining Out goes international [Pitbull Mr Worldwide airhorn ident]. Let me explain: I am writing to you not from my dining table in London or my sofa in London or my bed in London. I am not writing to you from London at all, in fact. I am in New York City, my favourite place that is not London. Specifically, I am at the Hyatt in Chelsea, and I am looking out at a city view full of oblong buildings and twinkling lights, each lit-up window representative of a party or a place of work or just a person, living. It is an extremely romantic tableau, or it would be if I were not alone, wretchedly hungover, and on my laptop*. 

I know that usually, Dining Out is a London newsletter and you read it to hear about restaurants in London. Unfortunately, however, I have not eaten in any of those over the last week, so you will have to put up with a post about New York instead. I’m here visiting for the first time since before the pandemic, so beyond getting misty eyed every time I turn a street corner, to be confronted anew with the sheer vastness and possibility of the roads and the American sky, I was excited to get to grips with some quintessential New York eating again.  

I have taken the task on with enthusiasm – I lined up for pizza at L’Industrie and got the burrata slice (just OK, bacon and fig jam white slice much better), mainlined a Nathan’s chilli cheese hot dog on Coney Island, and blacked out with pleasure eating lemony baked clams in front of the celebrity wall at John’s of 12th (Russell Crowe has been a patron, the mark of quality). If you’d like to hear more of an overview of everywhere I went while I was in the city, I’ll share details about how you can do that next week. For now, however, I’m just going to focus on one specific dinner. The best food – and, in fact, perhaps the most quintessentially New York of all, if you are thinking about what New York might become as well as what it has been – was a Friday night meal at Superiority Burger, an East Village vegetarian restaurant which, to put it bluntly, might be my favourite place to eat on earth. 

In the latter half of the 2010s, when I’d come to New York pretty much every year because I had a salaried job which sometimes brought me here (truly rest in peace Noisey, where your paid employment for the day would frequently be contributing to an article called something like ‘100 Insults For Father John Misty’), Superiority Burger used to be a hole in the wall in the East Village, where you could pick up great vegetarian food for less than $10 a dish. 

It was burgers served on trays, maybe gelato too, and it always fucking rocked. I’d make a point to visit every time I was in the city, and I liked it because it was cheap and reliable, plus the place’s aesthetic was like the DIY venues where I spent most of my free time in my teenage years and early twenties, getting kicked in the head and probably doing untold damage to my hearing (the owner, proprietor and general brains of the operation Brooks Headley used to drum in a load of hardcore bands, so this makes sense). 

Details of daily specials were handwritten and taped up behind the counter like merch table lists, the cups were paper not glass, and you’d sit and eat squished against the white tiled wall, underneath an old White Castle advert or a Shaggs poster. I just thought it was cool, basically – so cool, in fact, that it was one of the restaurants that got me into restaurants in general; caring about what was on the menu and how stuff was made and the experience of being in the place on the whole. On a trip here in 2017, I even bought the Superiority Burger t-shirt, emblazoned with a photo of the storefront, which I still have. 

The original restaurant was open from 2015 until 2021. As time went on, the kitchen, led by Headley, began adding seasonal veg, prepared lovingly and imaginatively, to the menu, alongside the staple burgers, sandwiches, and the famous burnt broccoli salad (places in America love calling their food “famous” but this thing actually was kind of notorious). Eventually, the place’s ambition, as represented by these especially creative dishes, outgrew its small space, and the time came for Superiority Burger 2.0.

The updated spot, nearby to the site of the first, opened in 2023, to great fanfare among New York’s food press – the first incarnation had long been considered the home of the city’s best veggie burger – with full seating (no more cramming your big ass onto a teeny window bar seat) (not me going to America for a week and saying ‘ass’ all of a sudden), and a longer menu, though it’s still built around four core sandwiches. There are, blessedly, no reservations, though someone I met here the other day told me that when the new restaurant first opened, the waiting time was two hours. Just over a year later, thankfully, though it’s still obviously a buzzy place, you can roll up at 8PM on a Friday night and sit right down, which is exactly what my little sister Grace and I did. 

Walking in, I was pleased to see that this new Superiority Burger sort of just felt like the “project”’s natural next phase – the Raichu to the OG’s Pikachu; a sexy new glow-up, like when I started wearing low-rise jeans because I realised that high waist doesn’t actually suit me. The place is lit like a Wong Kar-Wei movie – low, humming with neon – and there’s a framed photo of Cherie Currie in the bathroom.

Booths run along one side of the room, in front of a bar, where all the drinks are made (the cocktail menu is long, and consists mostly of well-made classics. I had a mezcal lemonade which tasted exactly as you’d expect and did exactly what needed to be done). There are counter seats on the other, meaning solo diners have somewhere they can easily slot in, and in the middle, there’s a row of diner style formica tables, which is where we were seated. 

After consulting the bright pink menus, our order was small but in my opinion perfectly formed. Grace picked the Superiority Burger on the recommendation of our very kind and knowledgeable server, I went for the yuba-verde – a sandwich of tofu skin, chilli broccoli rabe, chickpea mash and spicy mayo – and we also chose a panzanella, which was a special menu item that day. We got dessert, too, because it’s truly Superiority Burger sacrilege to skip it: a special trifle with polenta cake and rhubarb lemon jam for Gracie, and a big whacking portion of gelato – low-key the best thing this place does – for me. I picked mint fudge swirl and black sesame and let Jesus take the wheel.

At Superiority Burger, food comes quickly and conveniently. It’s designed to be the type of place where you stop by, rather than being somewhere that you linger, though there’s none of that rushed-ness that I hate – the speed is just built into the nature of the food, which is mostly sandwiches and small sides. First out was the panzanella, though it wasn’t quite a traditional version of the dish. Panzanella is usually made with Italian bread, tomato and red onion; this take on it consisted of house-made stracciatella, cucumber, focaccia croutons, basil, fresh apricots and a light but definitely vinegary and fennel-y dressing. 

After one bite, I was delighted that it came out by itself, given a moment to be the Beyoncé of the table, rather than acting just as a side for our sandwiches. It seems like an understatement to say that this panzanella was the best salad I’ve eaten in ages, because it was more than that. It was completely harmonious, but it also showcased its star ingredient – those apricots – like I have not tasted them before. They positively zinged, the flavour almost vibrating on your tongue, teased out more by that sharp dressing, calmed by the cheese, and complimented by the mild, palate-cleansing cucumber. Everything in the bowl was designed to make you understand just how special the apricots were, and I think it’s so rare to see fruit and vegetables treated that way – though of course, this is Superiority Burger’s entire MO. 

You can see that in the wild genius of dishes like the yuba-verde. Its major filling is yuba – or strips of tofu skin, with a chewy, meat-adjacent consistency, though of course it is not trying to imitate meat in any way, because it’s its own delicious ingredient – served spicy. It comes with “sausaged ceci” (crumbled chickpeas, spread onto the bread), broccoli rabe, and a cooling mayo. It’s a brilliant creation, which takes in the best of what veggie ingredients can do from across cuisines (yuba is an east Asian ingredient; broccoli rabe is most common in Mediterranean cooking), and shoves them together thoughtfully but unpretentiously and even uproariously, kind of like if hyperpop was a hoagie. 

I can honestly say I’ve never eaten cooking quite like it – American in presentation, international on closer inspection – but I hope at least its spirit of innovation catches on, though as Jonathan Nunn wrote in Vittles a few months ago, “Superiority Burger will only be the future when someone else manages to take its ludic spirit and make it their own, or when a corporation has worked out how to replicate it successfully.” I do wonder if either is actually possible, because I feel like Superiority Burger sort of exists in its own dimension – I hate to use this language because it makes me sound like I’m writing for a broadsheet, but the place and its mission have, very genuinely, always been the definition of “punk”, and I think SB is only the way it is because those principles of doing things entirely your own way are, clearly, inherent to many aspects of its creators’ lives – but I hope we see more of its ilk, at least. 

As for the other dishes, the Superiority Burger itself remains the original and the best, as good as it ever was, only the bun is softer and no longer seeded, which is, I think, an improvement**. And the dessert, of course, is magic. 

The trifle was done with polenta cake in place of lady’s fingers, plus tart rhubarb jam. The mint ice cream was like if the best mint choc chip you’ve ever had was swirled with the old McDonald’s hot fudge sauce (RIP to the McDonald’s sundaes, I think about the caramel one weekly), and the black sesame flavour reminded me of an entire scoop of the biscuit bits from the Haagen Dazs Cookies and Cream tubs I used to beg my mom for at Apollo Video in Hall Green on a Friday night after school, just minus a little of the sweetness. I stopped eating my gelato because I was full, but as we were getting up to go, I swiped what I had left in my little paper pot to take on the walk, just because I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. 

Of all the eating experiences I’ve had in New York, it was Superiority Burger that I was most excited about, and that most delivered. Of course it’s fun to eat whatever pizza in the city that happens to be the most hyped up, and lose an hour to looking at the endless varieties of yoghurt or whatever in basically every single supermarket. It’s another thing entirely, though, to go back to a place you really love, and observe that it is still itself, but improved in every way. It was a thrill to eat at this restaurant. I can’t wait to see what it is like by the time I am next in New York. 

I paid for this visit.

* For posterity’s sake I should say that I also wrote a very small portion of this post on my phone, sat at the bar of Superbueno, a Mexican American cocktail bar. I was drinking something called a ‘green mango martini’ and while I usually hate it when drinks that aren’t martinis call themselves martinis, this one had enough of a smack of booze (tequila, fucking Sauternes???) that I will allow it. It was good for sipping and it made me pretty drunk. Superbueno indeed. 

** Grace mentioned that she would have liked more pickles in her burger, which is a fair comment, though I must publicly apologise to her here because in the one bite I had of it I did also sneak an entire slice of pickle. I am committed to growing, staying accountable for my actions, and being a better sister. I am sorry Grace. 

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Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. It’s free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to support what we do, you can do so here. To receive Dining Out directly to your inbox, subscribe via the button below:

See you next week!