A new style of burger that’s hitting restaurants across the country leans even heavier on the cheese in the word “cheeseburger.”
You’ll find it at the Japanese TokiDoki Burger in Minneapolis. For $5, give any burger on the menu a “fondue” upgrade. Cooks pour cheese sauce onto a sizzling cast iron platter, slice a burger in half, and place it cut-side down in the pool of bubbling cheese. Diners are meant to swipe the burger through the hot cheese, but nothing’s stopping them from giving their side of fries or chicken wings the same treatment. It’s a burger with all the head-turning appeal of a hissing and crackling platter of fajitas.
In the hometown of the Juicy Lucy, “I wanted to make something special that nobody [else] has,” says chef and owner Yuichiro Matthew Kazama — thus, cheese outside the burger instead of in it. Naturally, Kazama’s cheese sauce uses cheese curds, though he adds dashi and kombu to anchor the resulting product to the rest of the flavors on the menu.
It’s a hot plate. The same idea is known as the “Futo Sizzler” at Bar Futo in Portland, Maine, where the patty is grilled over binchotan. At the San Antonio ramen restaurant Noodle Tree, the “Tokii burger” comes either in a truffle cheddar sauce or a spicy version with additional sliced jalapeños. Order the “Shoji burger” at San Francisco’s buzzy, new Bar Shoji, and your server will pour the cheese sauce into the hot platter in front of you.
Does calling them cheeseburgers do them justice, or are they more like burgers with cheese? Call them what you want, they’re burgers for the era of made-for-video menus, when the only way to usurp the ubiquity of the cheese pull is to up the ante further.
To Bar Futo chef and co-owner Cyle Reynolds and many others — especially tourists — Portland, Maine, is a lobster roll town. So while the seafood staple appears on the restaurant’s lunch menu, the Futo Sizzler was meant to appeal to the local crowd as a leveled-up version of an approachable dish. “I want to be a restaurant that’s loved by locals, and I think it’s that kind of stuff that does it,” he says.
It makes sense that, for the most part, this burger style is making its first appearances in the United States at Japanese restaurants. Tokyo’s smashburger-focused American Diner Andra appears to be the originator of the trend, having served a similar burger in silken cheese since 2022. In Japan, the category of food known as yoshoku refers to Western food with a Japanese twist.
The trend first gained traction more locally, with restaurants in the Philippines, Guam, and Pakistan offering the sizzling burger before it hit the U.S. The sizzling burger’s new presence stateside marks a moment of full-circle cultural exchange, however: an American-themed diner in Japan influencing Japanese restaurants in the U.S., and doing so through one of the most stereotypically “American” foods. The burger has long been a symbol of globalization, and as that same dish trends on opposite sides of the world, it shows just how permeable the boundaries between food cultures have become, thanks mostly to social media.
At Da’ Burger Wing Hub in Wahiawa, Hawaii, chef and owner Arjay Mijares doubles down on the sizzling cheeseburger’s fajita-like appeal. His take is a cheeseburger with peppers and onions that’s served in pepper jack cheese sauce, then piled with onion rings and pico de gallo. It’s not even the restaurant’s flashiest burger: Mijares has also served a mac and cheese burger that gets cheese sauce poured over the top, and burgers on sizzling platters that are set on fire.
Located away from the city and with a largely military base clientele, the goal is to offer burgers that “no one has had before — the bigger, the better,” Mijares says. It’s essential, as a newer restaurant, he says, to leave diners looking forward to the theatrics of the next special.
The 2010s brought us absurd, shock-and-awe burgers: unreasonable toppings, huge patties, buns dyed weird colors, flecks of gold foil, and so on. The 2020s, so far, have seen a swing back toward simpler smashburgers. The sizzling cheeseburger, in all its gooey glory, suggests that the pendulum is swinging back again, into the realm of showy performance and captivating cheese.
