The mob has reached the vestibule. It’s 5 pm on a Thursday and the staff of Superiority Burger waits with palpable tension, a battalion line bracing for assault. There is always a New York restaurant of the moment, but there’s something in the air here, something more than lingering post-Covid hunger FOMO, or the fact that this is the first intoxicatingly warm night of spring, the cherry and crabapple trees in bloom across the street in Tompkins Square Park, and Avenue A doing a surprising impression of Bourbon Street. There’s the usual animal kingdom of trend-chasers lined up outside the new restaurant, in the space that previously housed the legendary Ukrainian diner Odessa Restaurant: the bullies, the beseechers, the selfie-takers. But it’s hard not to detect an extra vibe. Call it an April-appropriate mixture of memory and desire.
Brooks Headley dons his trademark paper soda-jerk hat over close-cropped white hair. He’s no stranger to running the kind of restaurants that people want, or need, to get into—not least Superiority Burger’s original incarnation. That was the tiny storefront, barely two-and-a-half blocks away, he opened in 2015—with all of six seats (they had fold-down desk-like tables) and six menu items, all vegetarian. It was an instant sensation; Eater sent in three critics on the first day. No doubt Headley’s bio helped: The D.C.-area-born hardcore-punk drummer for bands like Born Against and Universal Order of Armageddon, who became the executive pastry chef at the four-star Italian restaurant Del Posto, won a James Beard Foundation Award, and then abandoned those lofty heights to sling veggie burgers.
Almost immediately after opening, SB’s tight focus gave way to a frenetic and inventive rotation of specials, all executed in impossibly tiny facilities. “We outgrew that space on day two,” Headley says. It was big enough to attract a cult following though, and a kind of rag-tag community, from the East Village and beyond, who made a ritual of trucking the paper food boats containing Headley’s latest creations over to Tompkins Square Park to eat. Notably this fan-base seemed to include nearly as many omnivores as vegetarians, presaging a nationwide shift toward plant-based fast food and “vegetable-forward” dining. Here was vegetarianism—even veganism, if you could forego the Del Posto-level gelatos—served without sanctimony or sacrifice. It is at least in part due to Headley’s groundwork that the hottest opening in New York being vegetarian is no longer its first, second, or third most notable feature.
For all that, even Headley, now 50, has been taken aback by the reaction to the new, full-service Superiority Burger. The restaurant officially opened at 9pm on a Saturday night, with no announcement. By Monday, Headley’s team was doing upwards of 275 covers per night, all with just a handful of booths and tables, pressed close together, and a nine-seat soda fountain. The scrum for those tables suggests that a certain subset of New York diners have—my words, not Headley’s—gone out of their fucking minds. There has been yelling from customers forced to wait their turn in the holding area in the back of the restaurant, a space that admittedly has about the charm of a podiatrist’s office. One guy shoved his way into an empty seat at the fountain. The personal calls and texts for reservations, which the restaurant doesn’t take, have been constant, and not always polite; Headley fears he may lose friends.
“People are furious with me. Sending me crazy, crazy texts about how I’m a terrible person, how my values are fucked up,” he says.
And yet, Headley seems almost ludicrously happy. He closed the original SB in November, 2021, with hopes of opening the new place soon after. This January, when we first began speaking, he was still grinding through the regulatory bureaucracy that would allow him to even cook in the new kitchen. He reminded me a little of Martin Sheen waiting on a mission in his room in Apocalypse Now.
“It’s almost like I have a nine-to-five job now,” he said. “Monday through Friday, we have things to do. But then, by like five- or six-o-clock, I’m just sitting in the big empty restaurant being like, ‘What the fuck am I doing now?’” As is frequently the case with Headley, it wasn’t entirely clear whether he was exalting or complaining. Pleasure and pain for him often seem to mingle.
Of course there was the thrill of a creative challenge. Like a haiku, or a great punk song, the original SB had thrived on constraint. The leap to a full restaurant had potential pitfalls. “In a big space, you can end up being more conservative, in a way,” Headley said. And the months of recipe R&D were not without highpoints. One night Headley texted excitedly about a breakthrough by pastry chef Darcy Spence:
“Darcy just made an accidental first draft of a potentially PERFECT vegan burger bun that was supposed to be baba au rhum I am actually giddy with excitement right now. How cool would it be if the same dough we can use for both buns AND baba au rhum???”
Was this madness or like being present at the discovery of penicillin? Maybe both!
Finally, in early February, he sent a photo of tongs lifting a tangle of blush-red linguine pomodoro from a steaming pot. “WE GOT GAS!!!” read the message.
It seems clear now that Headley wasn’t the only one bursting with anticipation. “We have so many regulars who have just been coming out of the woodwork,” Headley says. “Crazy old regulars who I haven’t seen since before Covid. The feeling in the room is so beautiful…people talk to each other.” At the fountain, he says, new friendships seem to be struck up every night. “It’s like,” he says, grasping for words, “it’s not like a normal restaurant at all.”
By seven, the place is at full roar. Platters flow from behind the bunker of stacked diner plates that all but obscures the kitchen window. Nearly every table gets a burger, which arrives open-faced with a tiny Muppet wig of shredded iceberg lettuce on its bun. There are bowls of burnt broccoli salad and of pink sweet-and-sour beets, topped with crumbled pretzel and set upon a bed of jalapeño cream cheese, and the “Sloppy Dave,” a flavor bomb of a sloppy joe impression with fried onions and an intense tomato flavor. (Headley himself is no longer a vegetarian though he describes himself as squeamish about rare or gristly meat in the way of a “seven-year-old meat eater.”)
And then there are dishes that evoke Odessa’s Eastern European diner fare: cabbage stuffed with mushrooms, rice, and tofu; a nutty, almost savory malted date shake that evokes a diner milkshake; a slender, white-fleshed sweet potato, roasted, halved, and dolloped with chopped pickles and labneh, that a friend points to when it hits the table and proclaims, “Vegetable kielbasa!”
Though Headley arrives early in the morning to do prep work and develop new dishes, and has lately been in charge of cooking the daily family meal for staff, he spends little time in the kitchen during service. Instead, he’s in constant motion on the floor, wearing his paper hat, black hoodie, dark green pants, and clogs. He checks in on tables, runs out burgers, and rushes to clear plates as quickly as they are done, a touch he says is borrowed from Roll-N-Roaster, the venerable Sheepshead Bay roast-beef restaurant. If there’s been one complaint these first weeks, he says, it’s that service is too fast. Often, he’ll bustle in one direction, only to pull up short as though he’s forgotten what he was doing, and then run off in another. In fact, he’s monitoring music volumes, which vary wildly from song to song and spot to spot, in part because he insisted on replicating Odessa’s vintage ceiling speakers instead of installing a modern sound system. For each dinner service, he creates a fourteen-hour playlist, which he then DJs in real time from his phone, adjusting to the shifting energy of the room. (If the mark of a truly great restaurant soundtrack is regularly defeating Shazam, Headley’s playlist achieves it tonight, by my count, in five songs.) On most nights he clocks over 35,000 steps according to the device on his wrist, without venturing beyond the short walk to his apartment and the restaurant floor.
Headley is insistent that Superiority Burger is a collaborative effort. He sends me a lengthy email, introducing nearly his entire staff, plus an extended family of regulars, neighbors, and contributors, in the manner of somebody assembling a heist team.
Sam Tavormina- Head Chef Born and raised on Staten Island. Insanely creative cook….We can talk about Rudimentary Peni AND/OR Robuchon pomme puree.
Fowzy Butt- SB director of lighting and liquids…I have seen him kick drunks out of bars with such effortless panache and style. He was made to work at SB pretty much. Name is pronounced like Fozzie bear. (He thinks this is funny.)
Michelle Tarantelli-Ave C neighbor and owner of tattoo shop…SO NEW YORK it hurts…installed a crazy tiled art piece on the back wall of SB, so she eats for free for life.
Perhaps aware of the impression his own pastry history might leave, he takes special pains to credit Spence and pastry sous chef Katie Toles. If you’ve seen a social media post from somebody’s meal at Superiority Burger it likely includes the pearl pie, which is inspired by Toles’s childhood in Hawaii. Emerging from the refrigerated diner case behind the counter, it’s an orange triangle of passion-fruit custard, set on a graham cracker crust and covered in a mango glaze studded with chewy balls of tapioca which resemble a profusion of beady little eyes. It looks like it’s crawled out of a Luis Buñuel movie and is very delicious.
All the same, to say that Superiority Burger is clearly Headley’s baby would be an understatement; better to say that it feels like his very guts have been spilled out into the world in restaurant form. This, like many aspects of Superiority Burger, feels like a throwback, to a time of more unabashed enthrallment with the mad visions of personality-filled chefs. For better and worse, the last restaurant I can remember being so simultaneously the expression of one person’s idiosyncratic sensibility and the only place that everybody absolutely needed to be right at that moment was Danny Bowien’s original Mission Chinese Food.
“It all flows through him,” says Sheryl Heefner. Heefner is a veteran of Eleven Madison Park, Union Square Cafe and others, who joined Superiority Burger in 2017 and is now managing partner and general manager of the new restaurant. “There’s just something about his life history, and the way he views history and culture—it all comes together into this intersection of art and music and food. This place is his voice. It’s his thoughts.”
Does this capture the spirit of downtown? I ask floor manager Quin Willis, as we survey the scene in full swing. Willis, better known as The Mighty Quin, is a decades-long veteran of New York nightlife, a longtime fixture at the departed Lower East Side bar Max Fish.
He looks at me and asks: “Which downtown? Which spirit?”
A perfect answer! And a good question. When Headley first announced the move into the Odessa space, it made an instant kind of intuitive sense: One era’s epicenter of underground cool merging with a previous one’s. It made sense to Headley, certainly, from the moment Odessa closed, a few months into the pandemic. After a year of trying in vain to contact the diner’s owners, who also own the building, he resorted to slipping notes under the shuttered gates. Headley has always given good letter; he famously got his interview for the Del Posto gig, despite minimal experience, on the strength of a drunken email fired off to the restaurant’s event planner in the early morning. (In it, he described himself as a “dessert psycho”.) Now, he pitched a vision to his prospective landlords.
“We are a restaurant born of, and for, the neighborhood,” he wrote. Though SB was of course a business, he went on, his aim was to “reclaim some of the fun and spark that is often absent from out-of-town interlopers looking to make a fast buck” in the area. “We know the locals, their dogs, send them food when they are sick and can’t make it over. Our main issue is lack of space. We need a bigger one!”
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He also pledged to leave the space much as it was. Whether or not this was what opened the door to negotiations and an eventual lease, he has stayed as good as his word. The ceiling tiles, stained with decades of cigarette smoke, have been replaced, but the booths are the same, albeit having undergone an epic gum-scraping session. It seems like only a matter of time before New Yorkers decide which are the most desirable: The one under a framed piece of TAKI 183 graffiti and a picture of Dojo, the longtime Greenwich Village vegetarian restaurant? The one loomed over by a giant photo of the 90s Japanese garage-punk band Teengenerate? Or maybe the sports-themed booth that Headley says he designed so that not everything in the place was music related. (With its portrait of Dock Ellis, the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who once threw a no-hitter on acid, and a baseball t-shirt from Moosewood Restaurant, it will not be mistaken for a booth at Dave & Buster’s.)
The overall effect is pleasingly disorienting, a little like the songs Headley sprinkles into his playlists featuring Motown singers doing their classics in foreign languages (The Supremes in Italian; The Temptations crooning “Mein Girl.”) Just recently, Natasha Lyonne’s Netflix series Russian Doll reinforced the idea of Tompkins Square as a kind of energetic hub of collapsed, commingling eras of New York underground life. And here, by coincidence or synchronicity, is a Russian doll of a restaurant. Headley describes it as SB being poured over Odessa like a sauce.
I accompany Headley to the Union Square Greenmarket, where he has been a regular since moving to New York in 2006. There’s something funny about enacting this hoariest and most genteel of chef-profile tropes with Headley—greeting fellow chefs, chit-chatting with farmers, looking out for the season’s first ramps—but it’s a good reminder that Superiority Burger is not only a vegetarian restaurant, but also a vegetable restaurant. For all the funhouse vibes, there’s very little sci-fi trickery in Headley’s food. Hauling bags of greens, along with an eight-pound sack of pretzels, into SB’s gleaming prep kitchen downstairs, we find a cook meticulously blanching cabbage leaves; another opens an enormous industrial cooker, which in conventional kitchens might be filled with the shaggy bones and gray foam of a veal stock, to reveal instead a bright sea of simmering collard greens.
It was Headley’s devotion to produce (vegetables as well as fruit) that distinguished his pastry work at Del Posto. He ended up in pastry in part because the culture of the savory line turned him off. “It was the late nineties in D.C., and the line was fucking brutal. The sous chefs were like grizzled veterans that had started in the seventies and hated their lives.” When I saw the pastry station, I thought, ‘I can relate to these people.’”
Dessert also presented a more interesting creative problem. “I liked it because you were kind of making something from scratch. I always compared it to writing a song, because you’re starting from nothing and then you’re creating something. It’s flour and butter and sugar and eggs, but then it’s totally different than how it starts. Whereas, I remember hearing something Charlie Trotter said about how you can take a piece of tuna or a piece of steak and do a bunch of stuff to it but, in the end, it’s still the same thing.”
The SB burger itself may have anticipated the Impossible and Beyond Burger boom, but its main ingredients are quinoa, chickpeas, onions, and carrots—more 1970s health-food co-op than laboratory. Headley admits that it leaves his signature product a little lacking in the structural integrity department, which happens to be my problem with it. On the other hand, the yuba verde sandwich, another holdover from the original SB, is a textural masterpiece, and perhaps the most carnivorous vegetarian sandwich I’ve ever eaten. Something about the feathery sheets of tofu skin, layered on a squishy hero roll with broccoli rabe and a spiced chickpea paste that evokes Vietnamese pate, flips the same feral switch in my chest as does eating, say, andouillette, the most offaly of French sausages.
Headley says that in his perfect world, he would keep Superiority Burger free of major animal proteins but be allowed to use fish sauce and pork fat for flavor. In their absence, he says, “the foundational flavors of SB are dates, good olive oil, generic non-fancy chili flake, and burnt bay leaf,” a surprisingly analog list in the age of mega umami-boosters.
Since long before Superiority Burger opened its doors, Headley has more or less lived at the restaurant. “Basically I live a block away and I just go home to sleep, or when my girlfriend makes me. Then I’m up at 5am and back in the kitchen,” he says. At a time when the restaurant discourse is centered on kitchen workers practicing self-care and achieving work-life balance, this unabashed workaholism seems almost transgressive.
“I do not expect my staff to work like this,” he stipulates. “I insist they work civilized hours, have their own lives beyond the restaurant, go to movies, museums, have band practice, go on tour, go to the beach, do art, go salsa dancing.” At the same time, he himself claims to have zero interest in any of that, much less the kind of normie niceties (house, kids) that many chefs find themselves craving as they hit middle age.
“I know a lot of people will say that restaurant work is physically taxing and this and that, but I’ve never felt that way,” he says. “I just love it so much. I love the rush of service. I love the thrill of prep. I love to cook.”
I ask if his body has continued to love it as much as his mind.
“I feel like I have superpowers!” he says. “It’s like when I used to do my favorite thing ever, which was touring. I can’t do that anymore, because I’m an old fucking man. But when you’re touring you have superpowers, too.”
Despite the photos and other trappings on the walls of Superiority Burger, Headley’s punk ethos asserts itself in the restaurant less as a set of aesthetics than of values: directness, simplicity, earnestness. And also anxiety. Practically baked into punk is the constant state of self-interrogation to determine whether one is being, or remaining, punk enough. Headley worries about the old guard of East Village Odessa regulars who may be judging him as a gentrifier. He worries especially about the inevitable price hikes that attended Superiority Burger’s transition to a full service restaurant—an especially hard step for somebody who came out of the idealistic, not to say puritanical, Washington D.C. hardcore scene. Headley still speaks of Ian MacKaye, of Fugazi and Minor Threat, in nearly religious terms.
“The old SB was about keeping things as cheap as possible, because I came out of D.C. in the ‘80s and ‘90s, where the idea was you work as hard as you possibly can for, like, zero. You get as little back monetarily as you can, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s what you love,” he says.
At the same time, the realities of a full staff, inflation, and pretty much everything about New York City in 2023 were unavoidable. The biggest sticking point, says Sheryl Heefner, was the price of the SB Burger itself, which started as $6 at the original Superiority Burger and had risen to $10 by the time it closed. “I know it’s been incredibly difficult for him to come to terms with,” she says. “Does the thing become less special when the prices go up? But now we’re a restaurant that has seats, and dishes, and people who need to wash those dishes, and people who need to put things on those dishes… it’s a much more expensive endeavor.”
For guidance, Headley turned to a younger generation of punk-chef. Chris Hansell is the frontman for the hardcore band Warthog and also the proprietor of Chrissy’s Pizza, which he started during the pandemic and quickly became a New York cult pizza obsession. Using a home oven in Bushwick, Hansell makes twenty pies per week, for a suggested donation of $28 and up, which typically sell out a month in advance and less than a minute after being offered on Instagram. When Headley tried Hansell’s pizza he was so impressed that Hansell woke up the next morning to an eight-paragraph mash email from the older chef.
Hansell reassured Headley that it was okay, even positive, to raise prices—advice that displayed a punk generational divide. “I went through the same thing with my bands, where you’re like, ‘Shit, do I have to sell this t-shirt for $25 when we all grew up buying shirts for $10?’” the pizza maker says. “But, yeah, it costs a lot of fucking money to make something!”
There’s another shift here, too, as the restaurant industry wrestles with how best to provide for its own workers. “My priorities have definitely changed, where it used to be all about the customer, and now it’s more about the staff,” Headley says. “This is a place where people make their living, and I want it to last a long time.”
After much back and forth, the SB Burger landed at $13. Headley has handled his lingering discomfort with humor. A note next to the $19 yuba verde sandwich compares the price of tofu skin to Wagyu beef. Beside the list of $17 cocktails is a simple “Yikes!”
Another night. Another mob. Heefner briefs the staff just before opening, reminding them to be on watch for critics and for the health department. “Everybody’s watching us, and we’re watching them,” she says. James Carr comes on the sound system, then Men’s Recovery Project, then The Merseybeats.
As warned, I find it impossible to sit at the fountain without finding myself in conversation. I meet a young British finance guy who can’t believe he’s eating vegetarian food, and I chat with Neel Dholakia, a tech consultant, originally from Mumbai, who was a longtime customer of the original SB. “It’s amazing to have a place to meet other people who love this place,” he says, finishing a dish of tahini gelato and rhubarb sorbet.
Headley is well on the way to his nightly step count and he wears the same look as his customers do when they have made it through the door, serve their time in the waiting area, and reach their table. It’s the look—dazed, bemused, semi-blissful—that says, “I’m finally here.”
