Who’d have pegged Hard Times Sundaes’ Andrew Zurica, that master of the flattop and the fryolator, as a minimalist? He is, after all, a man in the habit of stacking three beef patties interspersed with slices of American cheese onto Martin’s potato rolls. He also thinks nothing of swaddling hot dogs in bacon and tossing them into the deep fryer, only to fish them out when sufficiently crisped and dress them up with chili, sauerkraut, onions, pickles, jalapeño, tomato, and mushrooms.
Still, everyone has a limit. And Zurica’s is topping burgers with fried eggs. “People are always asking me to put eggs on burgers,” he says. “But I’m a purist; eggs are for breakfast.”
Which is not to say that the man is uncompromising. To wit, his brand-new breakfast burger — two eggs pan-fried in gobs of butter, smothered in cheese, and larded with bacon and a four-ounce beef patty on an old-school Brooklyn-baked poppy-seed Kaiser roll. Some might consider this a burger on a Kaiser roll with an egg on it — make that two eggs. But Zurica sees things differently. To him, this is an egg sandwich with a burger on it — the burger is the garnish and not the other way around — and as such it’s only available in the morning (8 a.m. to 11 a.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on weekends) at Hard Times’ kiosk in the Urbanspace Vanderbilt food hall.
Whatever you call it, it’s delicious. Like a classic bodega egg on a roll, but better. And with a burger on it.
