Hamburger Helper: George Motz Opens his First Restaurant
A burger scholar builds a fandom and a SoHo spot for his Oklahoma fried onion burger
Throughout November, we’ll be posting reported features, essays, lists, and more around our monthly theme: The Influence Appetite.
Before ever thinking about opening a burger joint, George Motz did his homework. It wasn’t so much the science of burgers — the chemical alchemy that transforms crisp raw onions into a caramelized tangle, melding them with porous ground beef. And it wasn’t economics, since Motz didn’t even sell his Oklahoma style fried onion burgers until late in his hamburger journey. Motz’s field of study (his double major, if you will) was in the history and sociology of what he calls “the American hamburger experience.”
Yes, before the 55-year old George Motz (pronounced moats) decided to act out on his particular sphere of influence with Hamburger America, his new MacDougal street restaurant, he was an expert on the hamburger as it’s been experienced in America since the 19th Century. I’ll spare you the history lesson, if only because Motz’s own history is a lot more fun.
His personal burger epiphany came, as many do, at the Apple Pan. The Long Island native was on his first trip to LA, to work as an assistant director of photography on a movie set, and touched down in LAX late and hungry. “Go to the Apple Pan,” someone told him. “It’s open till one.”
“It’s truly incredible,” Motz says. “It's got tartan wallpaper, people were wearing paper caps, it’s super fast. It was almost lost in time. That the fifties had come to a close and nobody told them. Until then I didn’t realize that a hamburger had any sort of culture, other than just, sustenance or fast food garbage.”
“This restaurant is supposed to be a piece of living hamburger history. When you walk in here, your first reaction is, ‘Oh wow, it's warm. It kind of feels like you're inside of a cheeseburger, you know? There's the dark brown, the light brown…the stools are yellow like the cheese."
Motz tucked away the Apple Pan revelation and continued working in movies and commercials, until 2001, when he set out to make a film of his own. “No one had done a good documentary about hamburgers. I thought, this is so much bigger than food. It became a story about America, really, small town America and their value in the gastronomic fabric of America.”
Motz hit the road when he could, criss-crossing the country to profile eight different burger spots for Hamburger America (2004) which ran on the Sundance Channel for almost a year. Most of those eight burger joints haunt Motz’ soon-to-open SoHo spot, appearing in photos hanging on the wall or in the decor itself — Motz points out the stools styled from the Apple Pan and the counter’s metal trim inspired by, among others, Milwaukee’s Solly’s Grille, home of the butter burger.
“This restaurant is supposed to be a piece of living hamburger history. When you walk in here, your first reaction is, ‘Oh wow, it's warm. It kind of feels like you're inside of a cheeseburger, you know? There's the dark brown, the light brown…the stools are yellow like the cheese."
After Hamburger America Motz went on to meticulously research and write a series of books that transformed him from burger obsessive to authority. “It's amazing how often people, especially ones who think they're influential, get the history and the facts wrong,” he says.
Quality counts even in a disposable, high-metabolism content universe and inevitably, brands and restaurant groups sought Motz’ vast knowledge. Meanwhile, his social media following grew and grew. Predictably, he bristles at being described as an “influencer”. “Let’s say, I’m influential.”
But that doesn’t explain how he went from burger scholar to the guy at the flat top with 60 patties topped with a nest of razor thin sliced onions. He was planning a promo event for one of his books, for a TV station in Seattle, when they made a request: “Can you make a burger in front of 250 people in seven minutes and also tell the history of the burger while you're talking to the host?”
Motz could do that. “I just randomly chose the Oklahoma fried onion burger. I knew it was only five ingredients, it would taste fantastic, and had a great history to it.” He says he watched the segment again recently. “You can see the host’s expression when she takes a bite. She goes, ‘Wow.” After the cameras stopped rolling, Motz got a taste himself. “I literally reached over, grabbed it from her, and took a bite. I was so curious. I was like, that's really good.”
That burger, a perfectly charred union of beef and onion and cheese on a chewy potato roll, took off and soon Motz was cooking burgers as often as he was talking about them. He’d jet off to Argentina to cook for Hellman’s or Brazil to cook for Heinz. He consulted for Organic Valley and Schweid & Sons. By early 2020, he had events lined up around the globe: “Toronto, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Stockholm — all canceled the first week of the pandemic.”

Housebound in Brooklyn with a suddenly empty calendar, Motz tapped into some pandemic resourcefulness. He posted a notice on Instagram and started taking orders. “I cooked in the back and my girlfriend and the kids ran the burgers to the front and slid them down a slide from the window.” (Motz says the Smithsonian is considering including the slide in their pandemic ephemera collection.) And yes, the Internet noticed. Post-pandemic Motz and his girlfriend went on to do hundreds of Instagram fueled pop-ups, which will continue until the restaurant opens.
It was never Motz’s ambition to open a restaurant. But again, blame it on the homework. “About 15 years ago, the Schnipper Brothers reached out and said, ‘We read your book, we've seen your film, and we used some of your research for our new restaurant concept,’ which was Schnipper’s. And we’ve been friends ever since.”
Now they’re in business together. Andrew and Jonathan Schnipper are backing Hamburger America and George is doing what he never set out to do. “I'm on my sixth book about hamburgers. I've had three different TV shows. I’ve done everything you can possibly do,” he says, “except open a restaurant.”
And with any luck from the New York City restaurant gods, in a few weeks, he’ll have done that, too. But that doesn’t mean his burger education will be complete. “There's plenty more to do in the burgerverse. I was asked to do a TedX talk about why we need to protect the American Hamburger and I've been actually working on a hamburger musical, no joke, for years. It's the story of a four stool diner run by three generations of the same family...you find out at the end of the first act that the building is being torn down and the business has been sold. It's a David and Goliath story with a feel-good ending!”
Hamburger America is located at 51 MacDougal St, on the corner of W. Houston St. They are currently in “soft open” mode, with daily hours from Noon - 8 p.m.