At Huda Burger, the singular focus on beefy smashburgers and pillowy milk bread buns pays off.
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Huda Burger / Photograph by Mike Prince
There are very few hard-and-fast rules in the restaurant industry, but one of them — a kind of primal law on which success can truly hinge — is this: If you’re going to do only one thing, you have to do it very well.
For Yehuda Sichel, that thing is burgers. And at Huda Burger in Fishtown, which opened in November, he nails it.
I remember dropping by here late after a semi-disappointing meal elsewhere, grabbing a double-smashed burger on a sweet milk bread bun from the short blue-and-white counter, and eating it walking — the bread still hot and charred from the flat-top, the cheese melty and threaded with strings of caramelized onions. I ate it, liked it, and that was that. But then I thought about that burger — sadly, on a special menu — the next day. And again the day after that.
Sichel comes from the universe of Michael Solomonov restaurants. He did time at Zahav and Citron & Rose. He ran the kitchen as exec chef at Abe Fisher early on, doing high-end Jewish diaspora cuisine.
So when he went his own way about five years ago with a sandwich shop called Huda in Center City, he focused his fine-dining-chef skills on the art of making great sandwiches.
At Huda Burger? Same thing. The menu is simple: smashed patties, milk bread bun, maybe a dozen variations. That’s the core of it. On the grill, the burgers get bricked so they cook hard and fast, picking up a lacing of crispy beef around the edges. In the standard version, the pickled green tomatoes add a sting of acid. The Cali burger is seared in mustard. There’s a pastrami sandwich mash-up with Huda’s own house-made pastrami, sauerkraut, and Swiss that feels thematically appropriate to Huda’s vibe, even if the burger itself gets a little bit lost in all the trappings. But the double-smashed burger remains my favorite — the bricked patty, the buns smashed panini-style on the grill, the whole oozy, delicious mess of it with its undertones of char and burnt sugars.
There are fries (curly and straight), and they’re fine. A buttermilk-soaked hot fried chicken sandwich dusted in Nashville spices and dressed in pickled jalapeños that’s solid, but not fundamentally better than any of the hundred other hot chicken sandwiches available everywhere in the city. The burgers are the main show here, and more or less from the jump, they have been great. Not stunning or artistic or overwhelming, but just the kind of stuffed, hot, beefy messes you want when a handcrafted burger is exactly what you’re craving.
2 Stars — Come if you’re in the neighborhood
Rating Key
0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America
Published as “In Pursuit of the Perfect Burger” in the April 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.