On a hot and sunny Saturday, two Houston Press food writers and five friends gathered together to drink some beer and eat some grub. The reason? To find the best new burger in town.  As you may have well noticed in the past month or two, there are a handful of new burgers in Houston vying for all your attention.  So where do you even begin? How do you see through the hype? What should be at the top of your list? Such are the questions we hoped to answer.

Sadly, two new burgers were, in fact, missing from the taste test— burger chan, which just rebranded itself from Kuma Burgers, isn't open on the weekends so couldn't be in the competition. Also, BLT's already-beloved Party Melt couldn't make an appearance since the bar didn't open until the evening and this was a lunch-time affair. And anyway, does a patty melt— however perfectly salty, meaty and dreamy— count as a burger? Probably not.   
The burgers that went head to head in our tasting have all debuted in Houston in the past year, most in the past three months alone.  The competition included: The lesser talked about burger at Bosscat Kitchen & Libations, the plant-based meat-like wonder Impossible Burger from Hay Merchant, everybody's fast food go-to Shake Shack, the we-based-this-off-of-Shake-Shack burger at FM Kitchen, the hyped Heights burger at Balls Out, the simplest burger you can get at Hopdoddy in Rice Village, and the house burger from the relatively quiet Rice Village expansion of Island Grill, which boasts a burger section on its menu.

In terms of the burgers we selected, we went for the most basic on every menu. All of the burgers were actually, well, cheeseburgers.

What we found with our taste test may very well shock you.  There were certainly some revelations among the tasters at the table. Seeing as most of these burgers are pretty hyped right now, it's really quite interesting to see how they really stack up head to head.

In order to do that, we stuck with an ultra-simple rating system, seven blind-tasters ranked the burgers on overall taste experience with a 1 to 5 rating system. Texture, quality of meat, the bun and toppings were all taken into consideration within the overall rating. It was quite the task. Some burgers disappeared much faster than others.

One caveat: These burgers all had to travel to an undisclosed location for the taste test. While none of the burgers seemed to lose their full integrity due to the car ride back to our testing place, this obviously isn't the same as enjoying one fresh off the griddle in its natural habitat, whether that be the capitalist hell hole known as the Galleria or a dark, welcoming beer bar in Montrose.

With all that in mind, you might want to rethink the next burger you'll be having in Houston.  Here are the results.