The Copeland Burger/A Love Supreme

There’s a lot of talk about burgers out in the blogosphere. There are sites like A Hamburger Today dedicated to nothing but hamburgers. There was a documentary done about burgers. I’ve done my share of writing about burgers right here on the Blackeyedpig. Earlier this week I had lunch with Tommy of Tommy:Eats at Blue Smoke in New York City specifically to eat their hamburger. I took a train into Manhattan and killed the better part of a day just to eat a burger. It was a pretty good burger too and they’ve got some tasty beer on tap at Blue Smoke but, and this is important, their burger pales in comparison with the burger served at Copeland in Morristown.

Now this isn’t exactly breaking news. After all, I’ve blogged about how great the Copeland burger is previously, as has Tommy:Eats. However, I went back to Copeland the day after I ate at Blue Smoke and I was just blown away by how great the burger is. So why isn’t there a line snaking around the Governor Morris hotel the way the line does in Madison Square Park for the Shake Shack ? Here’s a theory: Copeland is too nice a restaurant to have street cred among burger aficionados. When people think of a place to have a great burger they think of a greasy spoon. A place like White Manna or White Mana, choose your location and spelling but both of these legendary NJ burger restaurants are both essentially dives, a place like Shake Shack, a place like the White Rose or White Diamond that we have in various locations around northern NJ. All of these places serve up a tasty burger, I’ll give you no argument, and all of them fit into our stereotype of a place to get a good burger. The diner in the famous Edward Hopper painting “Nighthawks” looks like the kind of place where you’d get a good burger.




Copeland doesn’t look like a place you’d get a good burger, it looks like the hotel restaurant that it is. A place where you need an expense account, a place where they expect you to have an expense account, a place where they don’t think twice about charging over $30 for most entrees. There are times when you need to put aside your preconceived notions and this is one of them. Put aside those preconceived notions and dig into the best hamburger you’re likely to ever order in a restaurant, maybe the best burger you’ll ever have anywhere. The secret is in the beef, the kobe beef. It’s not hard to make a good burger but it does take exceptional meat to make an exceptional one and a chef smart enough not to try and overwhelm that ingredient with lots of fancy toppings. The Copeland burger comes with cheese, bacon, tomato and lettuce, it doesn’t need to come with more. It doesn’t need to be offered in a hundred variations. It doesn’t need to come with anything at all except the home made brioche bun which holds it together and absorbs the burger’s juices.

So put aside your greasy spoon bias and give Copeland a try. If I can go to New York to eat a burger I don’t see why people can’t travel to Morristown to do the same. If you need company, I’m usually around.

Here's another look at a picture of the Copeland burger from a previous entry: