Of all of Nature’s gifts, nothing is dearer to the hearts of drunks and gluttons than the slider. The slider! So named because of the ease with which it enters, and exits, the gastrointestinal system. Glorified in film and in literature. The end of a thousand loveless nights, and the start of a million melancholy days. I love the slider, and can't get enough of the little fellows.

The hamburger, you see, is a paradoxical creature. It is most itself when small, so that the basic proportion of surface to interior is 1:1,  ideally with a browned coarse surface that yields to oozing interiorities within. But people like to eat hamburgers with more meat; and most restaurants are only too happen to appease them. So the hamburger, as it becomes more popular, loses its soul, like a rapper who spends so much time quaffing Cristal in nightclubs that he forgets the mean streets.

A big New York-style bar burger frequently weighs in at an obese 8 or 10 ounces, and its dismal, unbrowned insides outstrip the surface to inside ratio 1:3. It’s a sad state of affairs, and the slider is a reaction to it. A slider frequently is so thin at to have a 2:1 surface to interior ratio, or (in the case of White Castle) no surface at all: just a gray plane of hamburger meat, nestled tenderly inside a dinner roll.

But now a great chef, a man of genius, has redefined the slider! David Burke, the avant-garde author of such postmodern masterpieces as fried foie-gras lollipops and pastrami salmon, has essayed the almost oriental art of the slider. I say “oriental” because slider cookery seems to me an exercise in stylized simplicity that is more Japanese than American in spirit. Burke, though, is as American than Sgt. Slaughter: a big man with a mullet, he could more easily be taken for a truck driver than the brilliant aesthete he actually is. His solution to the slider is to intensify it, maximizing every aspect. So the meat is a thick patty, almost meatball-like in its proportions. But by an ingenious system, he extends the meaty crunch to the outside extremities of the bun. Here’s how:

1) A miniature English muffin is sliced so that the bottom part is three times as thick as the top. This bottom part is then hollowed out.

2) The meat, of the finest Creekstone beef, is formed and placed inside the bottom bun. The bread now covers its whole upper hemisphere; the bottom hemisphere gets smashed into a hot griddle.

3) The meat juices cook into the bread. And there are a lot of meat juices: Creekstone produces some of the juiciest beef around, and I would be surprised if these burgers were more than 80% lean (Burke says they are sirloin, i.e. 90%.)

4) When the burger has taken a strong brown on, the sandwich is flipped over, and the top bun put on. The bottom bun is now actively absorbing meat from the round burger, and its own bottom surface is being beautifully browned in the burger’s precious fluids.

5) The burger, and a hundred of its brothers, are placed in a warming oven, there to get even crunchier, until the bread is brittle with beef juice, like a translucent steak fry with no dry whiteness within.

It’s an amazing sandwich, and yet for all its power no more filling than a hamburger of comparable size and weight. A halved cherry tomato is pinned to the sandwich with a toothpick, but this is unnecessary even as a garnish and should be removed and flung away as soon as humanly possible. Still, the sandwich approaches perfection on its own terms, and its outside deep crunch and rich inside softness are wildly dramatic, especially in a sandwich so small.

The David Burke slider is the happiest innovation to hit the hamburger in years. Hasten to its home at Burke Bar at Bloomingdales as soon as you can.