The Crispy Decadence of the Patty Melt

As  great dinner sandwiches go, it is hard to beat the patty melt: ground  beef, Swiss cheese and caramelized onions griddled on rye bread until  they become a crisp, oozing package of salty-sweet delight. “They are  one of the truly great underappreciated sandwich creations of all time,”  said Ed Levine, founder of the Serious Eats website, where he maintains  a list of his five favorite versions from across the country. “No one  thinks about them,” he said. “They haven’t gotten their due!”One  place where they have is in the family of the Los Angeles restaurateur  Tiny Naylor, whom many call the patty melt’s originator. In the 1950s,  Naylor put a patty melt on the menu of Tiny Naylor’s, his cool modernist  drive-in on Sunset and La Brea, a sandwich to answer the design of the  restaurant. (Look at the curve of that toast!) Naylor’s granddaughter,  Jennifer Naylor, said she remembers eating patty melts with milkshakes  at the restaurant as a kid. She later included them on the menu at  Wolfgang Puck’s Granita, in Malibu, when she was the executive chef  there in the late 1990s. Her father, Biff, put one on the menu of the  restaurant chain Du-par’s when he bought it in 2004. He called the  sandwich Tiny’s Classic.When  I caught up with Jennifer Naylor, she was actually cooking patty melts,  as part of a tasting menu for a catering client who wanted to try them  for a late-night wedding-party snack. “Fresh-ground prime chuck, Gruyère  and caramelized onions on rye grilled with butter,” she said. “I  believe that’s pretty close to the original recipe my grandpa served  back in the day.”

‘No one thinks about them. They haven’t gotten their due!’     

It  is also pretty close to the one Joe Carroll serves for lunch at St.  Anselm restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and to the one that Bill  Telepan used to serve at his restaurant on the Upper West Side until it  closed in May. Patty melts abound in these United States. You can find  them in fast-food restaurants like Steak ’n Shake and Friendly’s, and  further up the chain of excellence in restaurants like the Little Goat  in Chicago, where Stephanie Izard serves patty melts with American  cheese and pickles, and at Pork Slope in Brooklyn, where Dale Talde  makes them with (of course) pork.But  you don’t need to go to a restaurant, as long as you learn the basics.  Making patty melts at home is an incredible gift — an object lesson in  cooking simply and paying attention along the way. The work takes time.  You need to caramelize the onions, but you can do so the morning before  you cook, or the night before. Just reheat them before you make the  sandwiches. You ought to cook the burgers in a shape that is slightly  longer than round, so that it accepts the shape of the rye more  pleasingly. (You should cook them until they are a little less done than  you generally like to eat them, since they will continue cooking once  you get them in the sandwich.) And you need to crisp the bread and melt  the cheese with care, so that all the elements can come together in your  buttery pan or on your griddle as if it were a form of magic or art. That  is true, as it happens, even if you don’t cook meat. As an experiment, I  once marinated portobello-mushroom caps in olive oil, balsamic vinegar,  soy sauce and a spray of chopped garlic, then roasted them into  submission in a hot oven, before using them in an otherwise-traditional  patty melt in the Tiny Naylor vein. It is now a mainstay of my  patty-melting, an outstanding vegetarian take on a dish with decidedly  beefy origins.On which subject, a final note. A patty melt is not a  hamburger. George Motz, author of “Hamburger America” and one of the  nation’s foremost hamburger authorities, said so definitively when I  reached out to him to discuss it. “It’s definitely in the burger  family,” he allowed, “but due to the lack of hamburger bun, it is a  sandwich for sure. So close, yet so far.”