Copycat Au Cheval Cheeseburger (Bon Appétit’s Best Burger in America, Made at Home)
Prep time: 10 min Cook time: 12 min Servings: 2
The line outside Au Cheval at 800 W. Randolph Street in Chicago’s West Loop has been a feature of the neighborhood since Brendan Sodikoff opened it in 2012. On weekend evenings, a one-to-two-hour wait is not unusual for a restaurant with roughly 50 seats. In 2012, Bon Appétit named Au Cheval’s burger the best in the country. The Food Network ranked it first in America. The Thrillist, Forbes, and GQ lists followed. Fourteen years later, people are still waiting outside.
The burger that earned those titles looks, on paper, like it should not be that special. It is a smash-style double cheeseburger — two thin patties smashed onto a flat-top griddle, stacked with American cheese, dressed with a sauce of mayo and Dijon mustard, topped with sour pickles and minced red onion. Nothing on that list is exotic. The ingredients you can source at any grocery store. The technique is what you cannot buy.
The Naming Confusion: A “Single” Is Already Two Patties
Before the recipe, the most important thing to know about Au Cheval: if you order the “single” cheeseburger, you will receive a burger with two patties. Their “double” has three. This is not a mistake.
Sodikoff and his team built the menu on the logic of the classic American smash burger, which has always held that a single thin patty is too flimsy on its own — it needs a partner. One thin smash patty is mostly crust with little interior. Two thin smash patties stacked together, each with their own seared surface and a slice of American cheese melted between them, form a coherent bite: crust on the outside, yielding interior in the middle, cheese running through every layer.
This means that for two people, you are making four patties. Keep that in mind before you portion.
The Smash: Technique Over Ingredients
The lacey, brown, irregular edge that photographs all over food media — the feature that made Au Cheval famous — is a function of physics, not ingredients. When a cold ball of 80/20 ground beef hits a screaming-hot dry iron surface and is immediately pressed flat under hard pressure, the fat at the edge of the patty is forced outward. It hits the pan surface directly, with maximum contact, and fries in place before the meat protein has time to set a barrier. The result is a thin, cracker-like rim of crisped fat around the perimeter of the patty that has almost no equivalent in conventional thicker-patty cooking.
This does not happen if the pan is not hot enough. It does not happen if you wait even 10 seconds before smashing — by then the exterior protein has begun to set and resists the pressure. It does not happen if you press the patty a second time after the first smash, which compacts the interior and pushes the remaining fat out as grease rather than crisping it at the edge. The smash is one hard, fast motion, immediately, and then you leave it alone.
Four minutes of preheating on high heat, a dry pan, and a stiff metal spatula. That is the whole technique.
The Dijonnaise: The Sauce That Seems Too Simple
A lot of Au Cheval analysis has gone looking for a complex secret-sauce formula — hidden spices, a proprietary fermented something, a finishing ingredient that explains why the burger works. There is not one. The sauce is Dijonnaise: good mayonnaise and Dijon mustard, roughly two parts mayo to one part Dijon, with finely chopped fresh chives stirred in.
The freshness of the chives is not trivial. They add a thin onion flavor that cuts through the richness of the fat without adding bulk, and the green color distinguishes the sauce visually from plain mayo on the bun. The ratio of mayo to mustard can flex depending on your preference — more Dijon gives it a sharper, more acidic punch; more mayo rounds it out into something richer. What the sauce does not need is augmentation. The American cheese, the smash-crust, and the sour pickles are doing a lot of work. A simple sauce lets them do it.
The Bun: Z Bakery and What Works at Home
Au Cheval’s official bun is from Z Bakery, a Chicago wholesale operation that does not sell to the general public. The buns are not true brioche — they are softer, less enriched, closer to a high-quality white sandwich roll. They compress when you press down on the burger stack without gumming up or tearing.
The standard recommendation for a home approximation is Martin’s Potato Rolls, which have earned their reputation: the potato flour gives them a faintly sweet, pillowy crumb and they are sturdy enough to hold a double stack with a running egg without disintegrating before the second bite. A soft supermarket brioche bun is a fine alternative. The qualities to avoid are a bun that is too large (it throws off the ratio), too dense and doughy (it competes with the patty), or too crusty (the first bite shears the stack apart).
The Fried Egg: The $2 Add-On That Defines the Experience
The egg is listed as optional. It is not really optional.
What the fried egg does when you press down on the assembled burger: the yolk breaks, runs down through the stack, and combines with the Dijonnaise into something that is neither sauce nor yolk but somewhere between them — fat-rich and tangy and warm. It coats the inside of the bun, pools at the base of the stack, and ties every other element together in a way that the burger does not quite achieve on its own. The bite without the egg is clean and structured. The bite with the egg is a little chaotic in the best way.
The mechanics: fry in butter, medium heat, baste the whites with the foaming butter until they are just set. Leave the yolk completely runny. Slide it directly onto the finished burger and get the plate to the table within 90 seconds, before the yolk sets from carryover heat.
Au Cheval occupies the corner of Randolph and Green in Chicago’s West Loop, which has evolved from a meatpacking district into the city’s most-watched restaurant corridor. Sodikoff’s Hogsalt Hospitality group has since opened several Chicago restaurants under the same umbrella, and the brand runs Small Cheval, a casual counter-service spinoff, at roughly ten locations across the Chicago area. The formula — a specific griddle technique, American cheese, a simple sauce, and the patience to not press the patty twice — has not changed.
