#82 in NYC

Skinny Louie

Name: Skinny Louie
Address: New York, NY, US
Price range: $

NoMad, Manhattan

6.5/10

#82 NYC · SOLID

Brotherly Breakdown

Written by Brotherly Burgers

Skinny Louie's classic cheeseburger is a solid, greasy, tangy fast-casual smashburger. The Louie sauce is the best part of it and the brioche bun is the worst.
The limited Steak Frites Burger, a pop-up collaboration with the Swiss brand Pretty Patty, was the more distinctive of the two. Crispy potatoes on the burger worked against a Café de Paris butter sauce to produce something we had not run into before.

Best for

Classic smashburgers, tangy burger sauces, double American cheese, grilled onions and pickles, and quick casual meals.

The catch

A smash burger on a brioche bun is not a strong combination. The grease that makes the style work is exactly what makes brioche go soggy faster than it should, and that is the build rather than an off night.

What it's actually like

Skinny Louie is a Miami-founded smashburger operation that opened its first New York shop in NoMad in April 2025 and has expanded across the city since. The menu is deliberately short: a few burgers, shakes, and fries.

The classic is built on Angus beef with double American cheese, grilled onions, pickles, and Louie sauce. Greasy and tangy, which is the correct profile for the style, and the sauce is what makes the tangy half of that work. It read ketchup-based and vinegary, and that acid is what keeps the burger from collapsing into pure grease.

The bun is where we would push back. Brioche soaks rather than resists, and under this much grease it went soggy quickly. That is a decision about the build, not a service failure, which means it applies to every one of them.

The Steak Frites Burger is a different exercise and needs to be judged separately. It came from Pretty Patty, a Swiss brand, as a limited collaboration rather than a Skinny Louie original, and the two elements our notes single out are the crispy potatoes on the burger and the Café de Paris butter sauce, which complemented each other. It was genuinely unique and we were glad to get it. We do not have component-level notes on its patty or bun, so we are not going to describe them.

One honest gap: our records do not settle whether one of us or both of us ate the classic.

Strengths

Louie sauce brings a ketchup-based, vinegary tang
Greasy and tangy profile true to the style
Competent classic build of double American cheese, grilled onions, and pickles
The Steak Frites collaboration was genuinely unusual
Crispy potatoes and Café de Paris butter complemented each other

Why this score

The classic works on the tension between grease and acid, and the Louie sauce holds up its end of that. It is a competent version of a format the city has a lot of.

What separates it downward is structural. The brioche is the wrong bun for this style, and it fails in a predictable way every time rather than occasionally. The collaboration burger sat higher for us on originality alone.