This Upper East Side mainstay dating to 1972 is a paragon of bar food. Sure the turkey club and chef’s salad are up to par, but the burgers command the most attention, especially when they pop up enticingly at the pass of the semi-open kitchen. The ground beef is fresh and the patty arrives deeply seared from the flat top, but still pink and juicy. Rippled cottage fries are the classic accompaniment.

Founded 15 years ago in Astoria, with a newer branch in Dutch Kills, Petey’s was in the vanguard of the local burger revival. Its burgers explode with flavor, though they are neither too thin nor too thick, topped with lettuce and tomato of studied freshness, plain American cheese, and raw onions a bit stronger than most. This is a paradigm of the American hamburger with no frills. The price is below average, too.

Burger Joint debuted in 2002 behind a curtain in the lobby of the glamorous Thompson Central Park Hotel, back when it was called the Parker Meridien. The restaurant is known for its thick, juicy burgers, and ordering one with “the works” gets you lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup. Other toppings, like chili crisp, ranch dressing, and sauteed mushrooms, can be added at a cost. Burger Joint has off-shoot locations in Penn Station and at Industry City.

The burger at Fairfax could be mistaken for a stunt burger, one that puts more emphasis on appearance than taste. It’s anything but. Topped with smoked cheddar and barbecue mayo, the flavor is sweet and smoky, with potato sticks adding some crunch and salt. It comes on a toasted, upside-down bun.

One of the most buzzed-about burgers of the season is sold from the ground-floor cafeteria of a Greenpoint grocery store. Jubilee Market sells a small, satisfying burger for less than it costs to ride the subway — $2.15 for one, or $2.55 with cheese. The budget burgers are influenced by New Jersey’s legendary restaurant, White Manna. Like White Manna, they have shaved onions and a compact bun. Unlike White Manna, they’re made with local beef butchered in the building and a hunk of slow-cooked garlic in the middle of the patty.

The “legendary” burger at Nowon lives up to its name: two patties (made from a blend of chuck and short rib), pickles, onion, and a toasted sesame bun are held together with a single skewer. A decadent kimchi butter sauce is distributed throughout. It’s an actually interesting riff on the smash burger that’s managed to hold up since this restaurant opened in the East Village in 2019, and it’s just as good at the restaurant’s new location in Bushwick.

Gotham Burger Social Club is different from other smash burgers. Instead of leaning into simplicity — cheese, patty, bun — it heaps on mustard, ketchup, burger sauce, pickles, jalapenos, and griddled onions, too, for one of the best burgers in town. One other way it’s different: You can order one with an old-school egg cream or a side of fried pickles. This permanent storefront opened on the Lower East Side at the start of the year; before that, owner Mike Puma ran Gotham Burger Social Club at pop-ups across town.

This distinctive red frame structure sandwiched between Briarwood and Jamaica Hills serves Bangladeshi, Indian, Afghan, and American food, and everything we’ve tried has been worth ordering. The lamb burger is particularly thick and juicy — no smash burgers here — and it’s cooked to a perfect medium, still pink in the middle. The fries are good, too.

Yes, this is one of the city’s oldest restaurants and it may have been the first restaurant in town to serve a hamburger in the 1870s. But more important, the hamburger, made from wagyu and available at lunch in the dining room and all the time in the barroom, is splendid, with the bacon and a sort of cheese fondue poured over the top included in the price. And so are the excellent fries.

When a burger approaches $20, without fries, it’s held to a different standard: We expect better beef, a cheese that holds its own, and maybe a spoonful of jammy, caramelized onions to tie things together. Rolo’s in Ridgewood hits all the marks with its double cheeseburger, throwing a pickled hot pepper on the side like it’s an old-school Italian sandwich shop. It’s rich and meaty, the kind of sandwich you won’t want to share but will be glad you did.

This might be any ordinary neighborhood bar, you know, the kind where you watch sports on weekend afternoons as you nibble nachos. But no, it concentrates almost exclusively on thick juicy burgers in a number of sometimes surprising configurations. There’s a Hatch burger, a breakfast burger, and — perhaps best of all — a half-and-half burger that mixes beef and bacon in the patty in exactly that proportion. A nifty idea, and the bacon doesn’t shoot out of the bun, as in the usual bacon burger.

Whatever you heard about big burgers being “out” hasn’t fazed Red Hook Tavern. This restaurant from the team behind Hometown Bar-B-Que, in the same neighborhood, is known for its burger, a thick patty topped with American cheese and a couple of rings of raw onion. It’s served on a bun speckled with sesame seeds and a small mound of cottage fries.