Inside the Eat'n Park test kitchen as the restaurant chain revamps its burgers for the first time in decades

As Eat’n Park turns 75 this year, the restaurant is celebrating its roots. Launched as one of Pittsburgh’s first drive-ins with carhops, Eat’n Park has been “flipping burgers since day one,” and the recipe for its signature double-decker sandwich, the Original Superburger, has remained unchanged. Adapted from its early days as a Big Boy burger, the Superburger has always consisted of two beef patties on three buns, finished with shredded lettuce, cheese, pickles, a house-made “sauce supreme,” and topped with a Heinz pickle slice.

But looking forward, Eat’n Park is enacting one of the biggest menu changes in its history — returning to fresh, rather than frozen, beef patties, now hand-pressed and prepared on the grill. An Eat’n Park press kit states that this new mode of preparation will extend beyond the Superburger to every burger served across 56 restaurants, following “the changing tastes and experiences guests crave.”

To make a menu change of this scale required more than a year of planning and preparation, much of which took place at Eat’n Park’s test kitchen at the Waterfront in Homestead. Pittsburgh City Paper was invited to the test kitchen to see how the fresh beef is prepared and to try the new Superburger.
The test kitchen — tucked behind the operating restaurant — is helmed by John Frick, Eat’n Park’s director of menu development, alongside culinary support specialist Joe Hull.

Though not set up exactly like Eat’n Park’s usual back-of-house, the space contains all the same kitchen equipment “so we can work through it all,” Frick tells City Paper. “It has to work within the system.”

The test kitchen also doubles as the restaurant for filming training videos and commercials, and Hull’s hand recently appeared in an ad promoting the new Superburger.

“That was quite a Hollywood movie set going on,” Fricks says.

A galley kitchen layout with auditorium-style seating along one side allows visitors to observe and offer feedback.

“Everything to support menu changes happens in here,” Frick says.

Frick and Hull, both longtime chefs at Eat’n Park for more than 30 years, said they were initially “apprehensive” about the new burgers, and were most concerned about supporting the kitchen staff.

“When you’re working in the kitchen, you get a routine … You just can feel that [something]’s ready to flip or ready to be done,” Frick says. “Learning that new skill takes a little bit of adjustment.”
The burgers were first piloted last fall at Hello Bistro, an Eat’n Park brand, where cooks were already working to press fresh patties. In recent years, thinner burgers have become a restaurant trend, in part “because of their quick turnaround,” Frick says. In 2018, McDonald’s also kicked off an industry-wide switch to fresh beef (part of a “better ingredients” strategy), citing the change as the restaurant's most significant in 40 years.

Retooling Eat’n Park’s preparation process to accommodate fresh beef began with “changing the mindset on how we build” burgers, Frick says, so that even with a condensed cook time, "everything comes up together at once, the food’s all hot, and everyone’s happy."

Rather than starting by tossing a frozen patty on the grill, Frick and Hull first toast and dress the burger’s buns. Frozen patties take six minutes or longer to cook, whereas fresh patties take about half that time.

Pressing a burger patty to spec can pose a “challenge,” Frick says, as overpressing can squeeze all the juice out. Eat’n Park’s new burgers are not smashburgers — another industry trend — which Frick asserts can wind up overly flattened with crispy edges, meaning “you don't get that burger experience that you’re looking for.”

As part of the development process, Eat’n Park tested patties to determine the best ratios of thickness, cook time, and quality. Ultimately, the restaurant custom-engineered a press with stops on it to ensure patties are pressed to the desired size. Hull — who says he’s still internalizing the new cook times — also leaves parchment paper on the burger after pressing it because “it helps save it a little bit … it’s still juicy and moist and not all dry.”
“We’re looking to get that balance of a nice sear on the outside of it, but still a good meaty burger feel when you get it,” Frick says, describing the new burgers as cooked medium to medium well.

Once the patties are grilled, Frick finishes assembling the burger quickly, conscious of its weight as he finishes “the build.”

“The fun part about a thinner patty is you can stack them as high as you want,” Frick says.

Another burger on Eat'n Park's menu, the Super Quadruple, includes four hand-pressed patties on a double-decker bun, and the restaurant has sold “a surprising amount of those,” Frick says.

With all the burger’s ingredients together, timing becomes key, as “[the] lettuce gets hot and it [can] start to collapse,” Frick explains. “That's why we want to get it out of the window and in[to] the guests’ hands as quickly as we can.”
City Paper photographer Mars Johnson and I tried the new Original Superburger and the Cheeseburger, which includes tomatoes and is seasoned with a custom blend of spices placed directly on the grill.

“This was [another] big change for us … because now we’re smashing the seasoning right into the patty,” Frick says.

Mars and I agreed the Superburger tasted fresh, meaty, and had the same basic flavor profile as a McDonald’s Big Mac. (This isn’t entirely coincidental — Eat’n Park’s original Big Boy burger inspired a Pittsburgh-area McDonald’s franchisee to invent the “Big Mac Super Sandwich,” first served in Uniontown in 1967.)

Both burgers’ patties were pressed to size in a non-smashburger way, leaving a little bit of pink in the meat. Mars and I also both preferred the seasoning on the Cheeseburger, with Frick noting that this might be incorporated more widely in the future. We hoped the move to fresh beef signals a shift to fewer processed ingredients in general.

Eat'n Park CEO Jeff Broadhurst recently told CP of the Superburger's return to fresh beef, “What’s old is new again.”

While training staff, Frick sometimes visits older Eat'n Park restaurants with basements, which were once outfitted with coolers and other equipment used for mixing meat and stamping out burger patties.

“It’s interesting … talking with people and they’ll say, ‘I don't understand what these lines on the floor are,’” Frick says. “Well, that's where the patty machine was bolted in.”

To Frick and Hull, revamping the burgers represents less of a throwback and more of an evolution.

Their fine-tuning over the past year "makes [it] easier to consistently execute and give a great experience for our guests," Frick says. “I think what’s old is new again, but with a few more refinements, a few more tweaks."