Nominated Your Fave Burger Yet? You've Got One More Week Before Voting Begins In LAist's Tournament Of Cheeseburgers

I'm counting down the minutes and days until we unveil your Top 32 cheeseburgers in all of SoCal next week.

Oh, you haven’t heard? You, our valued readers, are the judges in our intense battle royale, LAist's Tournament of Cheeseburgers.

That's when the best cheeseburger in the land will be decided by your votes.

The response we’ve received so far has been incredible! We've already collected more than 2,500 nominations. But there’s still time to nominate your favorite burger before voting officially begins on Friday, May 24.

How it will work

We’ll announce the Top 32 burgers with the most nods on May 24.

Then, your votes will narrow them down to the Savory 16, followed by the Tasty 8, and then finally the Flavorful Four.

It all comes to a head on July 7, when we’ll invite our top contenders to Smorgasburg LA for the event of the summer, and crown the final winner. The event is free.

“We are incredibly excited,” Zach Brooks, the general manager of Smorgasburg LA, told me. “We at Smorgasburg have a long history of cheeseburger love and support."

If you’ve never been to Smorgasburg, this is your time to go. It happens every Sunday just outside DTLA and features a fantastic array of food vendors that serves some of the best fare in Los Angeles, all hand-curated by Brooks. In addition, I Love Micheladas has a beer garden with DJs, along with an artisan craft fair every week.

From that vantage point, Brooks has a front-row seat to the ever-evolving burger universe.

“I feel like burgers are cyclical,” he said. For a while, "an expensive, thick bistro burger” was all the rage. Then, he said, tastes “swung in the opposite direction with the Smash Burger; you had just the thinnest possible patty with aggressive charring. And now things might swing back in the other direction.”

Brooks said several of Smorgasburg’s regular vendors plan to switch up their traditional menus to offer cheeseburger-themed specials for the tournament. (In the past, Quarantine Pizza Company and Cali Dumpling have made cheeseburger-themed offerings. If we’re lucky, they’ll do it again for this event. Fingers crossed!)

If the possibility of cheeseburger-inspired dumplings, pizza, and a cadre of top-tier SoCal cheeseburgers aren’t enough to get you to Smorgasburg on July 7, what will?

We look forward to seeing you there!