K.O. Burger

K.O. Burger comes from the team behind 375 Chicken 'n Fries and wraps itself in boxing imagery, which sets an expectation most burgers with a theme quietly fail to meet. This one follows through. The Knockout Burger is smashed patties with American cheese, onions, K.O. sauce, ketchup, mustard, pickles, and pickled jalapeños on a potato roll.

The sauce is what makes it. Tangy, briny, and slightly spicy, and genuinely one of the few burgers that has given us an actual kick. Most burger sauces gesture at heat. This one delivers it, and we enjoyed it.

The patty is the part we would change. We wanted more crust on it. On a smash build the crust supplies most of the texture and a real share of the flavor, and without enough of it the burger leans further toward its condiment than it should.

Fix the crust and this moves up, because the flavor idea is already there.

One note on the record: we did not write down whether we ate the single, the double, or the triple, and there is a second location in Chelsea we did not visit.

The sauce is a real differentiator and it does something almost nothing else in this category does, which is why the burger sits where it does rather than lower.

The limit is the patty. A smashburger that does not develop enough crust gives up the texture and contrast the format depends on, and leaves its sauce carrying the burger alone.