El Sazón R.D.

The Single Dominican Smash Burger puts fried cheese on the burger alongside a Pat LaFrieda patty, American cheese, pickles, and chimi sauce on a potato bun. The fried cheese is the whole idea, and it is good.

Where it comes apart is in how the pieces relate. Our reading was that the burger was solid but the elements did not connect, and that the fried cheese ran a bit overwhelming. A component that assertive needs the rest of the build to answer it, and here the parts sit alongside each other rather than combining.

We want to be clear about the limits of what we can tell you. Our notes on this one are four lines long. They cover the fried cheese, the beef, and the overall impression, and we have not extended them into an assessment of the patty's crust, the chimi sauce, or the bun, because we did not write one down. This is also a multi-location operation and we did not record which one we visited.

Two components stood out and both were good: the fried cheese and the beef under it. That is a real foundation.

What keeps the burger where it is, is that those parts never add up. A build with a component this dominant needs the rest of it working in concert, and ours did not.