A Late-Night Smash Burger Spot Expands With a Second Location Across Town

Big small burger news for Manhattan this week. 7th Street Burger, the East Village burger shop home to one of the borough’s best smash burgers right now, is headed to Greenwich Village. According to owner Kevin Rezvani, the new restaurant — the burger shop’s second location in the city — opens at 110 MacDougal Street, near Bleecker Street, on March 25.

Rezvani says he’s hoping to appeal to some of the rowdy, after-hours energy of MacDougal Street, which he likens to the Times Square of lower Manhattan. In the East Village, the restaurateur has hired a bouncer to keep on an eye on intoxicated patrons, and the burger counter’s busiest hours are sometimes minutes before it closes at 3 a.m. on weekends. He’s bracing for an even more boisterous crowd in Greenwich Village, with plans to hire an additional two bouncers for the new restaurant.

“MacDougal is wild,” Rezvani says. “East 7th Street is nothing compared to what MacDougal can be.”

7th Street is sticking to the same formula that earned it an early following across town: a six item menu consisting of three burgers, fries, water, and Mexican coke, served from a counter-service spot with six seats indoors. As Eater critic Robert Sietsema notes, part of burger spot’s appeal is its extreme simplicity: No frills, and nothing that costs over $10. There’s no outdoor seating just yet, so hovering with a smash burger on the sidewalk out front will have to do for now, Rezvani says.

The expansion comes less than a year after 7th Street opened in the East Village, and Rezvani tells Eater he’s hoping to build on his early successes with the Greenwich Village outpost. His restaurant, not much more than a small counter for ordering and a covered outdoor dining structure out front, arrived amid a larger wave of smash burger openings in lower Manhattan last year, but set itself apart with simple, “spectacularly greasy” burgers served late into the night.

7th Street is the latest to cash in on what’s quickly becoming one of the year’s biggest food trends. Harlem Shake, among the city’s oldest independent smash burger restaurants, expanded with a location in Park Slope earlier this year, while Smashed, which opened on the Lower East Side roughly a year ago, recently announced plans to open an outpost at the Ashland apartment complex in Fort Greene.

For its opening week, 7th Street Burger is open Friday and Saturday, from 4 p.m. to 3 a.m., and Sunday from 4 to 10 p.m.