Smashburger Is Piling Pastrami On Burgers And Hot Dogs & We're Here For It

Smashburger has a new burger coming out and they’ve put another beef on top of the beef.

Videos by Sporked

Starting October 6th, the chain is giving its menu the New York deli treatment with two new limited-time items. The New York Pastrami Smash takes a regular beef burger and piles smoked black pastrami on top, while the New York Pastrami Big Dog does the same thing to a quarter-pound beef hot dog.

So if you’ve ever reached the end of a burger and thought there simply wasn’t enough cow involved, October is looking good.

What’s On Smashburger’s New Pastrami Burger?

The New York Pastrami Smash starts with a Certified Angus Beef patty topped with smoked black pastrami, Swiss cheese, grilled onions, dill pickles, mustard, and mayo. The whole thing comes on a butter-toasted Parker House roll.

Most of those ingredients make perfect sense together. Put pastrami, Swiss, mustard, pickles, and onions between two pieces of bread and nobody is going to ask questions.

Then there’s a hamburger underneath.

A pastrami sandwich has never really been lacking in the meat department. At least, I’ve never looked at one and thought it could use a beef patty hiding underneath everything, but Smashburger has found the space.

And I do appreciate the dill pickles still showing up for work. They’re wedged between a burger patty, smoked pastrami, melted Swiss, and grilled onions trying to provide some crunch. That’s a lot of responsibility for a pickle.

The Parker House roll is another departure from your standard deli sandwich. Smashburger butter-toasts it, because once you’ve stacked one beef on another, dry bread would be a strange place to start exercising restraint.

There’s A Pastrami Hot Dog Too

Smashburger could have stopped with the burger. It did not.

The New York Pastrami Big Dog takes a quarter-pound Angus beef hot dog and covers it with smoked black pastrami, Swiss cheese, grilled onions, dill pickles, and mustard on a toasted Big Dog roll.

The burger was beef on beef. This is beef on beef in a new shape.

At least with the burger, everything lines up. The patty sits there. The pastrami sits on top. Everyone understands the structural assignment. The hot dog has more laws of physics to battle. You’ve got sliced pastrami and all those toppings balanced over a round hot dog, with a bun on either side. I would not come to Smashburger wearing white.

The Big Dog does leave off the mayo found on the Pastrami Smash, so there is one fewer thing trying to escape the bun. Small victories.

And while pastrami on a hot dog isn’t exactly unheard of in deli territory, it’s not something I expected to see arriving at Smashburger alongside a matching pastrami burger. They’ve taken the New York deli idea and committed to it with an impressive amount of meat.