The 25 Best Cheeseburgers In America

If you're like most people, you probably think that a burger isn't a burger if it doesn't have some cheese on it. Thankfully, there's no shortage of amazing cheeseburgers out there, and — from a Connecticut burger that's cooked inside a custom-made steam cabinet to a burger that has melted cheese hidden inside of it  — we've tracked down the country's 25 best.

The 25 Best Cheeseburgers in America (Slideshow)

Every year since 2013, we've set out to find the best burgers in America, and in June we named the top 101. Our system for ranking these burgers is extensive and thorough: We started by assembling a list of nearly 250 burgers from all across the country, made up of suggestions from burger authorities, online reviews, and existing best-of lists both in print and online. We then compiled these into a survey which we sent out to a panel of noted writers, journalists, bloggers, and culinary authorities from across the country, asking them to vote for their favorites, limiting their votes to ones that they'd tried within the past two years. The results were tallied, and the burgers that received the most votes made the ranking. As usual, we didn't include large chains like Shake Shack and In-N-Out — we celebrate the best chain burgers annually as well — choosing instead to focus on smaller-time restaurant owners.

In order to distill that list into a ranking of the top cheeseburgers, we first needed to ask ourselves a question: What exactly is a cheeseburger? For our purposes, we're defining a cheeseburger as a burger patty that's topped (or stuffed) with just cheese, as well as the usual condiments and the optional lettuce, tomato, pickles, and onions. No bacon, no green chile, no mushrooms, no egg, no avocado. To be a great cheeseburger, the emphasis needs to be on the meat and the cheese, period.

 

Read on to learn which cheeseburgers are America's best. It's easy to make a cheeseburger, but it's a lot harder than it looks to make one that's truly great. All of these burgers are made with high-quality beef (no lamb or turkey here), and they're all properly-proportioned, well-seasoned, nicely seared, and made with love (or at least with skill). We apologize in advance if you read this before eating lunch, because by the time you're through, you're going to be starving.