Making a worthy burger depends on architecture as much as it does on great ingredients.
You can throw all the Prime short rib and Epoisses you want over feathery brioche buns made in a local oven. If it all falls apart in a basin of grease and bread by the second bite, your esteem for the consistent engineering at In-N-Out is sure to double-double.
Burger structure is a subject that Maria and Armen Khoudoian, owners of The Mouth in Burbank, have spent months studying.
Open for four months on a corner of Riverside Drive, the couple’s sparkling clean, eye-popping burger spot has a simple roster of smashburgers, croissant burgers, spicy chicken sandwiches, and smack dab in the center of the menu, an attention-grabbing “pocket burger.”
Emerging from the liminal shadowlands between a savory meat pie and the Hot Pocket, the burger patty in this creation comes encrusted by its own buns. The meat is grilled on a flat top before it’s built between two halves of a Dutch crunch bread bun, and topped with chopped raw onions, American cheese, pickles, and a Thousand Island-style “secret” sauce.
The entire burger is then placed between the hot irons of a sandwich press that resembles a convex pancake griddle. That gets flipped vertically, on its side, for about 35 seconds, liquid burger fat and cheese escaping from its seams.
The emerging result resembles a flying saucer patterned like a Ninja Turtle’s shell. A traditional burger cooked in front of your eyes and sealed up in a sarcophagus of flaky carbohydrates.
This innovation keeps your burger hot until you’re ready for the first bite. It also ensures your burger is easily held by hand, without the usual mess. Something Maria must be as keen on as we are.
“I’m a clean freak,” Maria tells L.A. TACO, proudly referring to her spotless restaurant, festooned with a colorful mural of a burger melting on an oversized mouth like a square of blotter acid. “Everything has to be clean.”
Maria grew up in Glendale, and Armen moved to the States from Russia at the age of 17 and lived in Tujunga. Her primary job remains as a commercial underwriter for an insurance company, while he has long worked as an electrician.
They opened The Mouth around Thanksgiving, with a push from her sister and brother-in-law, the owners of L.A.’s Ghost Sando Shop, who wanted to launch a burger concept.
Although there’s at least one similar burger in L.A. called the U.F.O., at the LessMess truck, built on a regular bun, Maria tells us she got the idea for making pocket-style burgers from a European social media account she saw.
“It’s not our invention,” she says. “We thought it was a great concept. Like, we don't have that here.”
So, what did we think of the pocket burger?
Stopping in for lunch this week with L.A. TACO’s ace investigative reporter and all-around burger authority, Lexis-Olivier Ray, I was immediately charmed by the cleanliness of the space. With its nostalgic counter and succinct menu featuring milkshakes made with real ice cream, the highest price you’ll see here is $12.50.
I was more blown away by Maria and Armen’s warm welcome and positive energy, which are commented on in the 61 Yelp reviews that give The Mouth a five-star rating.
“The customers,” Maria exults about her favorite part of running the restaurant. “I love the customers. My husband and I are both talkative and love to chat with customers. We become friends.”
As for the pocket burger, our initial expectations were exceeded. The Dutch crunch buns, the same Fresno-sourced ones used at Ghost Sando Shop, held a nice balance between crispy and pleasantly chewy, bursting in on a hot, juicy, peppery patty that dallied with sweet, crunchy onions, tangy pickles, and a slurry of gooey American cheese comingling with said “secret” sauce.
It packs all the notes of a classic California road-stand burger encapsulated in one easy-to-eat package. The burger taste is concentrated in a seamless vessel with none of the mess.
At The Mouth, the innovation is all in the bun.
Some of the mess. By the time the burger hits its last bites, it’s still soaked with juices and sauce, making for the last best bite one hopes for. One could picture this sort of spherified burger in the hands of every Jetsons-style worker bee of an autocratic-AI-ruled future.
The pocket burger is only offered with double patties. One of many solutions in successfully making a pocket burger that Maria spent months experimenting on, along with finding the right bun and onion consistency.
“It took us about two or three months to [get everything right],“ Maria says, recalling their initial order of a palate of the wrong bread they had to work through. “We tried with one patty, we tried with three. One patty didn’t work cuz it was not enough meat. Three patties would have closed the pocket. Sliced onions were too stringy. We tried circles. Grilled onions just didn’t have the crunch. It took us months.”
We enjoyed our pocket burgers and look forward to trying more of the Mouth’s food. Especially as Maria recommends adding the kitchen’s chili to the pocket, a popular choice with the firefighters and cops who come in often to eat.
If I hold any reservation about adhering consistently to the pocket-style approach come burgertime, it would be the prominence of bun, especially that skirting just beyond the burger's margins, putting a greater overall focus on bread than on meat. While the pocket neatly coheres every burger element into most bites, there remained a little density in the vestigial bits of the bun I could do without.
Still, the burger makes for a great curio in the legions of unique burgers in L.A. and beyond.
“People haven’t seen it,” Maria says. “Most of the time they’re curious about the way that it looks and what it is. I think most of it is curiosity that sells it. And then it tastes good.”
The iconic North American burger is marked by a stalwart adhesion to simplicity and tradition. But the people of the U.S. have become jaded, hostile even, to our institutions. As a nation prone to ennui, it’s little surprise that we as a country have found so many ways to torture our burger patties in pursuit of meaty new national diversions.
We smash them. Stuff them. Boil, broil, and double broil them. Deconstruct them. Soak them with truffle oil and charge $100 for them. Perhaps worse, we sometimes even embellish them with arugula.
At The Mouth, the innovation is all in the bun. Solely there to keep things tidy for all you burger neat freaks out there. And all the components of a solid, classic burger intact and tucked safely inside.
The Mouth ~ 4017 W. Riverside Dr. Burbank, CA 91505
