The regional table / Utah
Pastrami Burger
Published October 22, 2026 · Utah
The business usually credited with this burger first turns up in Utah's newspapers in a help-wanted column, and the burger itself turns up on a menu in Ogden with its name in brackets, as though the reader might not know what it was.
Utah's newspaper archive is reachable in a browser and not by script, and searched there this dish gets more honest and less tidy. "Pastrami burger" returns 202 pages and the search ignores quotation marks, so each one has to be opened; the earliest that survives reading is the Ogden Standard-Examiner of 6 January 1980, where a restaurant lists under the heading "GOURMET BURGERS" a "Bacon Burger", a "Mushroom Burger", a "Blue Boy Burger", a "Mt Ogden Burger (Pastrami Burger)" and a "(Pizza Burger)" — the name in brackets beside a house name, which is what a menu does for something a customer might not recognise. An apparently earlier hit in the Ogden Standard-Examiner of 21 June 1973 is a false positive and a good warning: the words come from a run-together list of a turkey processor's products, "turkey salami bologna ... pastrami burgers steaks and meat loaf". The first dated Salt Lake printing I could verify is a coupon in the Salt Lake Tribune of 5 November 1982 — "PASTRAMI BURGER 4 lb. With Cheese, FRIES or ONION RINGS, MEDIUM DRINK", two addresses on South State Street, "EXPIRES NOV. 30" — where the fraction has lost its numerator to the scan but the quarter-pound patty and the cheese are plain enough.
The restaurant named in the plan for this page is Crown Burgers, and the archive neither confirms nor refutes the 1978 founding date usually attached to it. The earliest appearance of the name I can verify is a help-wanted column in the Murray Eagle of 15 March 1979, where "Crown BURGER" sits among the classified advertisements; the OCR interleaves adjacent columns badly enough that I cannot reconstruct the advertisement around it, so what that page proves is the name in print in the Salt Lake Valley in March 1979 and no more. By 26 February 1981 the University of Utah student paper is listing "Crown Burgers" with two addresses in a column about cheap places to eat, and does not mention pastrami at all. The fullest account is a Salt Lake Tribune feature of Sunday 8 January 1989, headed "Ambience, Quality Food Key Crown Burgers' Success", which gives dates for everything except the thing I wanted: the family sold The Athenian restaurant in 1975, John had gone to Southern California and opened a hamburger outlet there, Nick was talked back into the trade by the queues outside a new one, and "They opened the first Crown Burgers Restaurant at 377 E 200 South" — with no year given. The dated openings it does supply are the others: West Valley City in 1980, Highland Drive in 1983, Layton in 1988, five restaurants by 1989. It also states what the dish is, in the plainest words anybody printed: "The most popular sandwich is the Crown Burger Special a quarter-pound cheeseburger stacked with pastrami", at a place that makes "everything from scratch every day", including "the onion rings and french fries". The surnames in that article come through the scan mangled and I am not going to guess at them. So: the burger is on an Ogden menu in January 1980, the business is in print in March 1979, nobody printed a founding year that I can find, and the quantities below were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
Order of assembly decides whether the pastrami is hot. Patty first, pastrami on the patty, cheese over the pastrami, lid on for a minute off the heat. Put the cheese straight on the beef, as a cheeseburger wants, and it sets into a seal: the pastrami then sits on top of a cooling lid, insulated from the only heat source in the sandwich, and arrives at the table cool in the middle of something hot. The right way round, the melting cheese runs down into the shredded pastrami and glues the mound to the patty, which is also the difference between a sandwich you can pick up and a sandwich that comes apart on the first bite. Cold lettuce and tomato go underneath, on the bottom bun, where they are not asked to survive the heat.
The federal definition of pastrami tells you which packet to buy. The labeling policy book is specific: pastrami is "Cooked cured beef with spices, generally made from the plate but other cuts can be used", and "The product must be smoked or treated with smoke flavoring", with the name "Unsmoked Cooked Pastrami" compulsory when it is neither. Two things follow for a burger. The default cut is the plate, a fatty, coarse-grained belly cut that shreds into exactly the tangle this sandwich wants, so a lean round-cut deli pastrami will sit in flat slabs instead. And watch the name on the packet: "Pastrami, Water Added" is flatly not permitted, but "Cooked Pastrami and Up to 20 % of a Solution" is an acceptable product name, and a fifth of that packet by weight is brine that will come out on your griddle.
The patty is a hamburger and not a beef patty, and the law distinguishes them. Three paragraphs of 9 CFR 319.15 describe three different products. "Hamburger" and "Ground Beef" alike "shall not contain more than 30 percent fat, and shall not contain added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders". But "Beef Patties", in paragraph (c), may contain "Binders or extenders", mechanically separated species, "partially defatted beef fatty tissue", and added water "in amounts such that the product characteristics are essentially that of a meat pattie". Buy coarse-ground chuck at around 80 percent lean and form it yourself: a pan-broiled 80/20 patty measures 15.9 grams of fat and only 83 milligrams of sodium per hundred, which is the right division of labour on this sandwich — the beef brings fat and almost no salt, the pastrami brings salt and almost no fat.
Pastrami is seventy percent water and a thousand milligrams of salt, so it has to be griddled dry. USDA puts cured beef pastrami at 69.5 grams of water, 5.82 grams of fat and 1,080 milligrams of sodium per hundred — lean, wet and very salty, which is precisely the wrong combination to lay cold on a hot patty. Pile it on a dry griddle in a loose heap, turn it with tongs for two or three minutes until the edges frizzle and curl and the surface stops glistening, and you drive off enough water to concentrate it and to stop it steaming the bun from the inside. Do not add fat to the pan: there is fat coming from the patty and the cheese, and the pastrami's job is to be dense and salty against them.
Ingredient notes
The beef: a pound of coarse-ground chuck at about 80 percent lean, divided into four four-ounce patties pressed a little wider than the bun. A quarter-pound is the documented size — it is the weight in the 1982 coupon and in the 1989 description of the Crown Burger Special — and it is the right size, because this sandwich already has two ounces of pastrami on it and a six-ounce patty turns it into a meat pile with bread. Salt only the outside of the patties and only as they go into the pan; salt worked through ground beef makes the texture springy.
The pastrami: eight ounces, two per burger, sliced thin at the counter rather than shaved to tissue or cut thick. Thin-but-not-shaved is what gives you a tangle that holds together on the griddle. Look for a plate-cut or navel-cut pastrami with visible fat and coarse grain; the lean "98 percent fat-free" style measures 1.16 grams of fat per hundred against 5.82 for ordinary pastrami, and carries essentially the same 1,010 milligrams of sodium, so all you lose is the thing that makes it good. Chop the slices roughly across the grain before they hit the pan.
The cheese and the buns: four slices of mild cheddar or American cheese, and four soft sesame buns. This is one of the places where a process slice earns its keep, because the emulsifying salts keep it flowing rather than breaking over a hot salty pile; mild cheddar grated works too. The bun should be soft and plain, big enough to close over the mound and not sweet — the sandwich has salt, fat and sauce to balance and no appetite for a brioche. Toast the cut faces dry on the griddle for thirty seconds, which buys several minutes against the sauce.
The salad and the sauce: finely shredded iceberg, a slice of tomato and thin raw onion if you want it, all on the bottom bun, plus Utah's own condiment. Fry sauce is mayonnaise and ketchup in roughly two to one, and it belongs on this sandwich as much as on the chips beside it; make it in the bowl while the pan heats. Keep everything cold until the moment of assembly, and shred the lettuce finely rather than using leaves, because a whole leaf acts as a hinge and the stack slides off it.
Step by step
- Shape the patties and get two zones going. Divide the beef into four, pat each into a round a little wider than the bun and about half an inch thick, and salt and pepper both faces. Heat a heavy griddle or a large frying pan over medium-high and leave one third of it cooler — you want somewhere to work the pastrami that is hot but not the hottest part of the pan.
- Griddle the pastrami first and hold it. Chop the pastrami roughly and pile it on the dry hot surface with no fat at all. Turn it with tongs for 2 to 3 minutes until the thin edges frizzle, the pile has shrunk and the surface looks dull rather than wet. Push it to the cooler third of the pan in four loose heaps and leave it there.
- Cook the patties hard and do not press them. Lay the patties on the hottest part of the pan and leave them alone for 3 minutes, until a dark crust has formed, then turn once and give them 2 to 3 minutes more. Pressing with a spatula squeezes out the fat that is the only fat in the beef half of this sandwich. A half-inch quarter-pounder is done through at about five minutes total.
- Stack on the patty, in the pan. Lift a heap of pastrami onto each patty, lay a slice of cheese over the pastrami, and put a lid or a bowl over the lot off the heat for 1 minute. The cheese melts down through the shredded pastrami and binds it to the beef. This is the whole technique and it happens in the pan, not on the plate.
- Dress the bottom bun while that happens. Toast the cut faces of the buns dry on a free corner of the griddle for 30 seconds. Spread fry sauce on both halves, then build the bottom in this order: shredded lettuce, tomato, raw onion. Cold things on the bottom, hot things coming down on top of them.
- Lift the stack over in one piece and press the lid on. Slide a wide spatula under each patty and lift the whole patty-pastrami-cheese assembly across in one movement, then put the top bun on and press down gently once to settle it. Wrap it in paper for a minute if you can bear to wait; it holds together better and the bun softens just enough to bite through.
A cold middle is the commonest fault and it is an order-of-assembly problem: cheese went on the beef before the pastrami did, so the pastrami never got heat. Rebuild it in the pan in the right order and give it a minute under a lid. Pastrami that has gone grey and limp rather than frizzled was not griddled long enough or went into a pan with fat in it — pour the fat off, dry the pan and start the pile again. If the whole sandwich tastes punishingly salty, the pastrami was a solution-added product; check the packet for "Up to 20 % of a Solution" in the name, and in the meantime add nothing and double the lettuce. A bun that has gone through at the bottom means sauce under the lettuce rather than above it, or an untoasted cut face. And if the stack slides apart, you used lettuce leaves instead of shred, or skipped the minute under the lid that glues it.
Storage and make-ahead
Nothing here keeps once assembled, and about four minutes is the useful life of the bun. The parts, though, are made for holding: griddled pastrami keeps 3 days refrigerated and reheats on a dry pan in a minute, which makes it worth griddling the whole packet at once even if you are cooking two burgers. Raw shaped patties keep a day covered in the fridge and actually cook better cold. Fry sauce keeps a week.
If you are cooking for a crowd, work the way a drive-in does rather than making them one at a time: all the pastrami griddled and held in heaps at the cool edge, buns split and sauced, salad in bowls, and patties going on in relays of four. Each sandwich is then thirty seconds of assembly. Leftover griddled pastrami is a better breakfast than it has any right to be, fried with eggs and eaten in a tortilla.
What to serve with it
Chips and fry sauce, which is the plate as Utah sells it, and onion rings if you are being faithful to the places that made the dish — the 1989 feature makes a point of the onion rings and french fries being made in the shop every day. Everything else on the table should be cold and sharp, because the sandwich is salt and fat from one end to the other: dill pickles, pickled peppers, a vinegar slaw. Nothing creamy.
To drink, something cold and not very sweet with enough carbonation to cut the fat — a lemon-lime soda, iced tea, or plain water with lemon, which is what you actually want halfway through one of these. A plain lager works if you want beer. Nothing with it afterwards except a milkshake, which is the other half of the drive-in bargain and is best treated as the dessert it is.
From the recipe box / Utah
Pastrami Burger
A quarter-pound patty under a mound of griddled pastrami and melted cheese, with lettuce, tomato and fry sauce — the Salt Lake Valley drive-in burger, dated here from a 1979 help-wanted column, a 1980 Ogden menu and a 1982 coupon rather than from anybody's anniversary story.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Total
- 30 min
- Serves
- 4
- Calories
- 660 per serving
Instructions
- Shape the beef into four 4-ounce patties wider than the buns, salt and pepper the outsides, and heat a griddle over medium-high with one cooler third.
- Pile the chopped pastrami on the dry hot surface and turn it 2 to 3 minutes until the edges frizzle; move it to the cooler third in four heaps.
- Cook the patties 3 minutes without pressing, turn once, and give them 2 to 3 minutes more.
- Put a heap of pastrami on each patty, a slice of cheese over the pastrami, and cover off the heat for 1 minute.
- Toast the bun faces dry, spread fry sauce on both halves and lay shredded lettuce, tomato and onion on the bottom.
- Lift each patty-pastrami-cheese stack over in one piece, press the top bun on and serve at once.
Nutrition
| Fat | 36 g (12 g saturated) |
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| Sodium | 1450 mg |
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| Protein | 43 g |
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| Serving | one burger, with fry sauce |
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| Calories | 660 |
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| Cholesterol | 135 mg |
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| Carbohydrates | 38 g (5 g sugar, 2 g fiber) |
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Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as
a courtesy, not as dietary advice.
Questions readers ask
Is fry sauce essential?
On a Utah plate, yes, and it is doing a job rather than being a local joke: a sandwich this salty and this lean on the pastrami side needs something sweet and acid, and mayonnaise and ketchup at about two to one supplies both at once plus the fat to carry them. Thousand Island and a plain burger sauce both work. Ketchup alone is too sweet and too thin, and mayonnaise alone leaves the sandwich tasting only of salt and fat. It belongs on both halves of the bun, and on the chips.
Does the pastrami have to be griddled?
Yes, and it is the step that distinguishes this from a sandwich with cold cuts on it. Pastrami out of the packet is 69.5 percent water, and that water goes into the bun. Two or three minutes on a dry hot surface takes enough of it away to concentrate the salt and the smoke and to give the pile some frizzled edges, and it also shrinks it, which is why two ounces looks like plenty on the griddle and exactly right on the burger. Steaming it, which some places do, is quicker and gives a softer, wetter result that needs a sturdier bun.
What cut of pastrami should I ask for?
Plate or navel if the counter can tell you, which is the federal default: the labeling policy book says pastrami is "generally made from the plate but other cuts can be used". That cut is fatty and coarse-grained and falls into a tangle when you chop it. The lean round-style pastrami and the "98 percent fat-free" products slice into flat slabs that do not tangle and, by USDA's figures, carry all the salt and almost none of the fat. Also read the product name: a packet called "Cooked Pastrami and Up to 20 % of a Solution" is a fifth brine, and that brine ends up in your pan.
Was it invented at Crown Burgers in 1978?
I cannot confirm that and the archive makes it harder rather than easier. Crown Burgers first appears in Utah's digitised newspapers in a Murray Eagle help-wanted column of 15 March 1979, and the long Salt Lake Tribune feature on the family of 8 January 1989 dates the West Valley City store to 1980, Highland Drive to 1983 and Layton to 1988 while giving no year at all for the first restaurant at 377 E 200 South. Meanwhile the dish itself is already printed on a menu in Ogden on 6 January 1980, sixty miles north, among a row of house burgers. So the business existed by early 1979 and the burger was on sale in two cities by early 1980; who put pastrami on a hamburger in Utah first is not a question anything I could open answers.