We Threw a Party with Shy's Burgers at Blackbird Club
Keep scrolling for a report and photo dump from opening night at our new members-only space at Parcelle ...
Photos by Matthew Weinberger.
If you haven’t heard yet, we threw a little thing the other night for our 3x and 5x Blackbird Club members, plus a few friends — because we believe excellent guests deserve good things. It took place at the actual Blackbird Club, as in the very real, very physical space. It’s also very private, but since you’re a reader (thank you) we’ll share the address: 146 W Houston St., which—yes—makes it the secret room off Parcelle’s West Village outpost. Nice digs, indeed. Blackbird Club members can consider it something of their very own living room, and we’ll be programming it from here on out with special and intimate events. Think: private dinners, powerhouse chefs, and cultural conversations with industry insiders and other tastemakers, by invitation only. Want in? Get the details on how to join Blackbird Club here.
For the first of our Blackbird Club dinners (our Burger League got in for a preview the previous evening), we invited Shyan Zakeri to pop up with his acclaimed smashburger outfit, Shy’s Burgers. His four-course menu—including the Blackbird Club Burger, a 6 oz. dry-aged blend with demi-glace crafted just for us—was paired with wine courtesy of Parcelle honcho Grant Reynolds, all of which was pulled from the man’s cellar of some 500 rare bottles. All in all, it was a pretty low-key yet fancy affair, with a pretty fancy burger to boot, something that Zakeri—a native Angeleno—typically doesn’t do.
“I moved to New York in 2015 to go to NYU and I really missed those greasy, cheesy, fast food-style burgers from LA,” he told The Supersonic while manning the grill in the space’s open kitchen. Grease sizzled, sesame buns toasted, Donald Byrd poured out of the speakers and floated above the din of conversation drifting in from the dining room. “This is sacrilegious to say but I was always disappointed with New York’s burger offerings.”
According to Zakeri, New York’s a pizza town, whereas LA is a burger town, not—as some might argue—a taco town. “In the 1950s, car culture basically built Los Angeles, there wasn’t a significant Mexican population back then, it was mostly white people, and white people love hamburgers. Now, I think every person in Los Angeles is a burger person. That’s our food of convenience.”
Count Zakeri among them. He grew up a few blocks from West LA icon The Apple Pan and subsisted off a steady diet of In-N-Out throughout high school. By the time he got to New York for college, the big pub burgers of the day were dominating (those found at The Spotted Pig, Minetta Tavern, Joe Jr.), and the burgeoning smashburger renaissance happening back in his hometown of LA hadn’t yet made its migration east. Zakeri yearned for the greasy, salty hamburgers of his youth. He also wanted to become a food writer, studying that alongside food anthropology and urban studies while at NYU — “food as culture,” is how he sums it up. Various creative endeavors followed graduation, notably agency work and a stint in music, though he admits to having felt “a little lost, frankly.” It wasn’t until he started serving burgers out of his apartment in 2021 that everything clicked — the career, the calling, and his burger roots coming full circle. Today, Shy’s Burgers has popped up everywhere (from public parks to Dimes Square to Gem Wine — RIP), and been sold in some wholly original ways, including a “party” that required guests to bring personal belongings in order to barter for their burgers. As with anything unique and delicious and made with that kind of obsessive whimsy that is the character trait of all great chefs, Zakeri’s burgers have garnered a rabid, cult-like following. And so, of course, we knew we had to have him kick off things at Blackbird Club.
“It’s a New York-style,” Zakeri said of the joint’s now namesake burger, which he admits seemed fitting for a sit-down dinner — hence the demi-glace (as well as touches like black garlic togarashi mayo and charred spring onions). “You guys asked me to make a special burger and I thought I’ll figure it out.”
Another thing Zakeri had to figure out on the fly? How much beef — 15 pounds of it, “as fatty as possible,” which he fetched from Pino’s Prime Meat Market across the street.
“I bought the perfect amount of beef,” he shouted with a smile underneath his broom of a mustache. “Don’t defame me!”
