THE FOOD SCENE
HELEN, HELP ME: ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF CHEESEBURGERS
A New Yorker food critic answers questions about burger toppings, beef tallow, and the subjectivity of memory.
By Helen Rosner
January 18, 2026
How do you approach the sweetness of
pickle relish on a cheeseburger? Does it
complement or compete with ketchup? There was a legendary place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that used to do mustard, relish, and ketchup, and I can't for the life of me decide if I loved it, or if I just loved being there in the middle of the night eating it. — Brian K., N.Y. C.
Honestly, I've never really considered pickle relish to be one of the hamburger's totemic toppings.
Sliced pickle rounds, certainly; spears on the side, without a doubt. But relish, that finely chopped, neon-hued, marmalade-textured stuff? To me, that's a hot-dog thing-which I mention here not to issue judgment but rather to illustrate how distinct my own personal associations are from your own. Herein, I think, lies the answer to your real question, which is not actually about the sweetness of the relish. The question of what toppings make a burger great, while we're eating it, is both technical and trivial, having to do with the nature of the patty and the bun, the mood of the establishment serving it, the sensibilities of the person eating it, even the time of day or night or life.
Regarding the substance of the burger itself, the same accoutrements that might show a slim, lacey-edged smash patty in its best light—a little slick of mustard, a few circles of raw onion, and a melty cap of American cheese, say-might be too flimsy against the brawny heft of a half-pound bar burger that can sustain degrees of sweetness, richness, and piquancy (your barbecue sauces, your secondary meats, your nontraditional cheeses) that would suffocate a smaller patty. But what you're really asking, I think, is what makes a burger great not as it's being eaten but as it lives on in memory.
Or, more to the point, how can we know that our memories of happiness are true? I spend an inordinate portion of my professional life creeping around in my own psyche, untangling knots of nostalgia and pleasure and, god, so many emotions, not least self-love and self-loathing, all of them unavoidable colorants of any bite I take. I give myself the task of locating some sort of unassailable, uncontaminated truth: that this dish of dumplings, or that cocktail, or such-and-such restaurant is actually, inarguably, wonderful. It's impossible, of course, and more than a little absurd, but it's so irresistible, isn't it, to attempt to discharge the burden of our own experience?
Was that burger you ate from the Tasty, in Harvard Square? I think it must have been, and it's been nearly thirty years since that perfect little sandwich shop closed forever. I imagine it was a simple construction: a bun, a patty, a slice of cheese, ketchup, mustard, relish. But you created it, just as much as the white-capped guy standing at the grill did. The mouth and brain and cascade of sensations were yours. There is no true burger per se, lurking behind your experience of it; it didn't become the burger you ate until you ate it.
It's a ludicrous idea, this notion of an objective culinary truth, but it's even more ludicrous that we're so quick to doubt our own taste in pursuit of it. Just as I go looking for proof that my rapture— or, at times, misery—at a given meal has nothing at all to do with me, here you are wondering whether you should append an asterisk to your reminiscence of a long-ago cheeseburger, one that you could never eat again, even if the Tasty were still up and running. Why question a recollection of sweetness, even of the pickle variety? You did love the relish. And you love the person you see in your memory: a young man, awake in the middle of the night, a burger topped with relish in his hands.
Sometimes someone writes to my intermittent @newyorker.com advice column and sets me up in a manner resembling Payton alley-ooping Kent www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
