4 Charles Prime Rib

The build is American cheese, pickles, onion, and Marie Rose sauce, with bacon and egg added. The Snake River Farms Wagyu is outrageously juicy, deeply beefy, and, when the kitchen is fully locked in, cooked and seasoned with near-perfect precision. Each bite carries the same richness and juice as the last.

Then come the bacon and egg, two ingredients that normally walk onto a burger convinced they are the main characters. Thick-cut bacon can flatten everything beneath salt, smoke, and fat. Egg can turn the whole thing into breakfast. At 4 Charles, both accept that they are role players. They complement the beef rather than hijacking it.

The brioche bun is where the argument starts. It is flaky, airy, and insanely bready. On certain bites, it becomes the first thing you smell and the dominant thing you feel. For a moment, the bun interrupts everything exceptional happening underneath it. The beef is still incredible, but it has to fight through too much bread to reach you.

The other issue is consistency. Derek has been roughly ten times and Nick at least five times since January 2026. The best batches are among the best burgers either of us has eaten. But Nick has also caught weaker versions that were nowhere near that ceiling.

That creates the split. Derek judges the burger primarily by how spectacular it is when it hits and places it among the city's absolute best. Nick penalizes the bun and the gap between its best and worst performances more heavily.

The 4 Charles aura is real. The room, the reservation warfare, and the feeling that you finally made it all amplify the experience. But the burger does not need mythology to be great. At its best, the beef earns the reputation on its own.

Getting inside is the final problem. A reservation at 4 Charles feels less like booking dinner and more like beating a video game designed by someone who hates you.

Au Cheval is the easier alternative. It scratches a similar bacon-and-egg itch without requiring the same act of divine intervention. But at their respective peaks, 4 Charles is the better burger. Monkey Bar belongs to the same restaurant family and broader burger style, but we do not consider its burger an adequate substitute. Our burger experience there was poor, even though the rest of the meal was fantastic.

The best version of the 4 Charles burger combines some of the strongest beef quality we have encountered in New York with precise seasoning and exceptional juiciness.

The burger cannot be evaluated only by its best performance. Its ceiling places it among the city's elite, and the gap between the strongest and weakest batches is what prevents complete consensus over exactly how high it belongs.