Call it pork roll or Taylor ham — either way, it's coming in burger form to LA

Some regional foods stay regional because they never get the chance to break out.

But now, pork roll, the sweet-and-salty breakfast meat that's been a New Jersey deli staple for over a century, is being given a smash burger makeover by a West Coast chef.

This Thursday, Proudly Serving, a burger joint with locations in Hermosa and Redondo Beach, will serve a Jersey Burger at the Hermosa restaurant from 5 p.m. until close. It's part of its monthly Kegs and Eggs event, featuring a tap takeover from Trademark Brewing in Long Beach.

(It marks the third time owner Matt McIvor has featured the burger. The first collaboration, in 2023, with Jersey-born chef Eric Greenspan, drew lines before the doors even opened.)

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While it’s true that Bristol Farms quietly has been stocking pork roll for years, and there's even been a Jersey Mike's in LAX's Delta terminal spotted serving pork roll breakfast sandwiches — the delicacy is not often seen on the West Coast.

(For the sake of this article, we’re calling it pork roll, rather than Taylor ham, because it’s what McIvor calls it. But the debate over its name — see below — splits New Jersey roughly along geographic lines: North Jersey insists on calling it Taylor ham, while Central and South Jersey stick with pork roll.)

McIvor, who grew up in Sayreville in Central Jersey — "Home of Jon Bon Jovi, that's our whole claim to fame" — has fond memories of eating pork roll with his family as a child. His earliest memory is peeling back the cloth casing on one of those mysterious meat logs in his kitchen around age 8 or 9, slicing off a piece and carefully cutting three slits into it so it would lay flat in the pan instead of curling up like a pepperoni cup.

What is pork roll?

Pork roll's origins date back to 1856, when Trenton butcher John Taylor created his secret recipe for what he initially called "Taylor's Prepared Ham" — a cured, smoked-pork product made from lean cuts mixed with sugar and spices.

Its flavor is tricky to describe — McIvor calls it a "sweet pork sausage with a nice saltiness,” making it ideal for breakfast. Think of it as a slightly sweeter version of Spam, which pork roll actually predates by almost 75 years.

John Taylor's Pork Roll comes wrapped in its cloth casing that gets peeled back before slicing.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 forced Taylor to rebrand since it didn't meet the legal definition of ham, which required whole pieces of pork, rather than ground meat. When Taylor tried to trademark "pork roll," a 1910 court ruling declared the term couldn't be trademarked, opening the floodgates for competitors. The naming controversy has persisted ever since.

The Jersey burger 

The Proudly Serving Jersey Burger is built on a Martin's potato bun — "also an East Coast thing, so it all plays well together," McIvor says — topped with a double-smash burger, American cheese and two slices of pork roll, cut with those three slits to make "a little flower" that keeps them flat on the griddle.

A fried egg cooked sunny side up but only halfway through — what McIvor calls "a half fry" — keeps the yolk runny enough to mingle with the meat.

The whole thing gets finished with ketchup, salt and pepper, the standard toppings that come automatically on every pork roll, egg, and cheese sandwich back in Jersey.

"This is generally a fairly sweet and salty burger," he explains, noting how the sugar in the pork roll plays against the salt in the meat and cheese to create that distinctive breakfast-for-dinner balance.

Can I find it anywhere else in L.A.?

For decades, pork roll was mainly confined to the mid-Atlantic region, rarely making its way beyond certain parts of New Jersey. In recent years, though, West Coast availability has quietly grown.

If you can't make it to Proudly Serving on Thursday, a few other L.A. spots carry pork roll year-round. Marconda's Meats at the Original Farmers Market stocks 1- and 3-pound logs, and New York Bagel & Deli in Santa Monica offers it inside their bagel sandwiches.

Though it's not quite the same as visiting your hometown deli at 7 a.m., where they know your order by heart, it's a close substitute until the next trip East.