Smash burgers have well and truly entered the Aussie lexicon – and the country’s best burger joints. The thin patties, smashed onto the grill and charred so the craggy edges are caramelised and crisp, have overtaken towering old-school burgers (with their thick slabs of beef piled high with “the lot”). At Jumbo, the Pastel and Pinco Deli crew’s new all-day burger bar, co-owner and chef Jimmy Garside specialises in lesser-seen Oklahoma-style smash burgers.
“It’s a regional smashed patty,” he tells Broadsheet. “[It’s] a thin patty you smash out with a big handful of really thinly sliced onions on top. As it’s cooking on one side it caramelises, and then when you flip it over you cook those onions out and they steam through the patty, which makes it super juicy … rather than losing the juice because you’re smashing it out so thin.”
Manchester-born Garside is the former executive chef at influential Sydney burger joint Mary’s. After leaving the group he linked up with Adelaide designer and restaurateur James Brown on Motel Mexicola in Bali and Aalto in Vietnam before moving to Adelaide and joining the Pastel crew (with Brown, Saba Maghsoudi and Elijah Makris, who also run creative agency 2049).
Their latest effort, Jumbo, opens today at the base of a Pirie Street office tower (with entry from Exchange Place). There’s a tight menu of five burgers, led by that Oklahoma smashburger ($16) with thick-cut pickles, double cheese and a flattened Rangers Valley beef patty between a milk bun. “I’m really happy we’ve managed to get this at a price point that I think is low even for Adelaide,” says Garside.
“I’ve been working with Rangers Valley on the patty for the past couple of months, so we’ve finally got that where we want it to be. It’s three cuts and there’s a really good fat ratio, about 25 per cent fat. It’s just super delicious.”
The Jumbo burger adds house sauce and salad. Then there’s a fried fish sandwich with a whole fillet of flathead, pickles, tartar, curried salt, cheese and iceberg; a Nashville-style hot chicken burger (rubbed in a dry spice, rather than drenched in spicy oil) with ranch, pickles, cheese, and chilli and garlic honey; plus a vego version with panko-crumbed mushroom.
“We’re just concentrating on the classics and doing them very well,” says Garside. “When you start throwing extra things on there I think it loses the quality a little bit.”
The menu also includes a burger special (starting with a “chilli smash” with pickled chilli relish, smoked chipotle mayo, crispy onions and cheese); sides like blooming onion, mash and gravy, and wedge salad; and, soon, dessert, including an ice-cream sandwich and a sundae loaded with cherries, cream, nuts, and more. “Everything you can think of, and the kitchen sink, is going to be on top of it. My [three-and-a-half-year-old] son loves sundaes, so it’s gotta be wild.”
Daily breakfasts include hotcakes with maple butter sauce, and sausage and egg muffins, “which look very similar to somewhere else that does American-style breakfast,” Garside smirks. Plus night trade on weekends.
The simple but slick 2049-designed space is more wine bar than burger joint, with exposed ceiling, plywood, concrete, pink communal tables, and coloured tube lights that switch from a warm glow during the day to fire-y red at night. There’s also an impressive line-up of drinks.
“We wanted to keep everything super lo-fi – I just wanted to make it feel really accessible,” says Makris, who also co-owns Eastwood’s Pinco Deli with Maghsoudi. “I guess we’re trying to marry Pinco and Pastel. Pastel is really good at night … Pinco is a straight day venue. So when we designed this we had in mind an all-day venue that can switch between both.”
As for those drinks, Hannah Tippet (ex-1000 Island) has assembled a list of local wines and American spirits, plus fun cocktails like a mezcal Negroni and a rhubarb Gimlet. “And for anyone who wants to be a bit bougie we’ve got Bollinger in the fridge, just in case,” says Garside. “A bit of fried chicken, a bottle of Bollinger, wash it down with a sundae. Heaven.”
50 Exchange Place, Adelaide
Daily 7.30am–3pm
This article was oringinally published on July 10, 2024 but was updated on August 2, 2024 to include the addition of the breakfast menu.
