This Takeaway Burger Spot, Out the Front of a Butcher Shop, Is Absolutely Smashing It

This week, we’re adding Eat at Robs to The Hot List, the definitive guide to Sydney’s most essential food and drink experiences.

If you were drafting the Sydney burger hall of fame, you’d have to start with classic Australian-style spots like Paul’s Famous Hamburgers in Sylvania. Then you’d have to make some space for the whole “fancy restaurant burger” phylum – like the ones at The Gidley, Poly, Hubert, Clam Bar and the ancestral progenitor from Rockpool Bar & Grill. Of course, there’s the Chur Burger, Pub Life Kitchen, Bar Luca and Mary’s heydays to consider, too.

In the 2010s, burgers around town were dialled up to 11. Mac and cheese croquettes, truffle aioli, candied bacon and other hectic adornments dominated. But for the last few years, we’ve swung back to simplicity. The humble smash burger has been Sydney’s burger king for a while now, and its reign is showing no signs of slowing down.

And though there are plenty of places doing excellent takes on the style, like Happyfield and Chebbo’s, one name seems to come up more than any other: Eat at Robs in Rozelle.

Eat at Robs specialises in Oklahoma smash burgers – a subgenre of smash burger that sees ribbons of onion pressed into the patty. Owner Michael Carter first tried them over a decade ago, while holidaying with his wife in America. He lucked out. It was a smash burger made by George Motz – who’s considered the global authority on hamburgers.

“The line was hundreds of people deep, and I thought, ‘Really? For cheeseburgers?’ I’ve eaten about a million of these things,” Carter says. “But then afterwards my biggest regret was only getting one – I couldn’t believe a burger could be this good.”

Upon returning home, he got to work trying to replicate his experience and preaching the gospel of smash burgers to Rozelle. He started Eat at Robs – which stands for Rozelle’s Original Burgers (no Roberts involved) – as a market stall in 2018. Then, in 2021 he took over his local butcher, Darling Street Meats.

The butcher supplies all the meat for Eat at Robs, and the vertical integration helps keep costs down.

Carter set up Eat at Robs as a takeaway-only spot out the front of the still-operating butcher, hoping it would, at best, break even.

“And it’s completely blown past our expectations,” Carter says.

Queues regularly crowd around the Darling Street spot, ranging from plucky Balmain pub crawlers and young families, to people picking something up from the butcher and grabbing an impulse burg on their way out. Increasingly, the queue’s made up of people visiting from around Sydney.

There’s a concise menu with just a handful of burgers, but the bestseller is the $20 Double Original combo: a classic Oklahoma smash with two patties, chips and a soft drink.

It’s taken him over 10 years, but Carter thinks Eat at Robs has finally recaptured the soul of the George Motz burger that started it all.

“I’ve spent all this time trying to create a similar experience, and then the other day I went [to Eat at Robs], and I felt like I had a flashback,” Carter says. “And I felt like I was back in that line, eating that burger.”

Eat at Robs
621 Darling Street, Rozelle

Hours
Tue to Thur 11am–8pm
Fri to Sat 11am-9pm
Sun 11am-8pm

@eatatrobs

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