After 24 years, Pete Marczyk’s famed Burger Night has found a permanent home.
The founder and CEO of Denver grocer Marczyk Fine Foods, which hosts the regular cookouts during the summer at its Uptown and Colfax outposts, is set to introduce a new concept next week at 7980 E Northfield Blvd.
“Many people say the Burger Night burger is the best they’ve ever had. They ask if we can do it in the winter all the time,” the longtime grocer said.
“We know itap a competitive space and very crowded,” Marczyk said of the burger industry. “But we think we can do it differently and better, just like the ethos of our whole company.”
When Marczyk FineBurger opens Wednesday, it will be an “incredibly faithful” version of the original Burger Night, Marczyk said. But he won’t be running the place. The operator is Tom Sprung, who owns the local firm Sprung Construction.
Sprung is the Colorado franchisee of Wahoo’s Fish Taco, which closed in the Northfield building earlier this month. He also owns the real estate.
“Tom approached us and asked if we’d consider doing a brick-and-mortar of (Burger Night),” Marczyk said. “We’ve thought about it a lot, but we’re just not restaurant people. And he was like, ‘Well, I am.’”
Burger Night has a stripped-down menu. Customers can order only a beef burger cooked rare, medium or well, and with or without cheese.
FineBurger will have more options. Along with the basic hamburger and cheeseburger, it will offer several combos, including “The Charlie Special,” a patty topped with Pueblo green chiles and Marczyk’s bacon aioli. Burgers will run around $15. Duck fat fries are additional.
The toppings bar will get an upgrade too, with bacon added to the regular cast of tomatoes, lettuce, red onion, ketchup, mayo and mustard offered at Burger Nights. And if beef isn’t what you’re craving, Marczyk’s will have “insane” chicken patties that can be subbed in.
“There’s an incredible amount of homogeneity in our food supply, so I think people will notice the ingredient quality of our burger and bun, which is a City Bakery brioche baked every day,” Marczyk said.
He and Marczyk Culinary Director Jamey Fader have been working with Tonalis Meats in Park Hill to develop a scalable recipe for the beef and chicken patties. Those will be delivered to FineBurger daily, Marczyk said.
“Itap the highest expression of the butcher’s trade,” Marczyk said of formulating the mix of fats and cuts that make up the patties. “And itap the center of this restaurant.”
FineBurger will also have shelves with Marczyk’s sides and sweets, like potato salad, a caprese pesto and brownies and Rice Krispies treats. He wants it to be an elevated fast food and retail experience, he said, with TV screens explaining the process when you walk in and kiosks taking your order.
The kitchen will have a small staff, and the burger cooking process will use higher tech equipment instead of the charcoal and mesquite fueled catering grills that power Burger Night.
“It will be fast,” Marczyk said. “The idea is that your wait time is very short, and we have a method that we think will work to accommodate that.”
Marczyk said this is the first of several FineBurgers that will appear across the state. Sprung also operates four other Wahoo’s in Colorado, and three of those are slated to convert into burger joints, with only the Boulder Wahoo’s being a potential holdout.
He and Sprung have a licensing agreement similar to the one Marczyk inked for his branded stall in Milk Market, the downtown Denver food hall. Sage Hospitality operates that miniature grocery store while Marcyk owns the branding and supplies it with food.
It will be similar with Sprung at FineBurger. Marczyk said the build-out is a shared-cost between the two and ran “a couple hundred” thousand.
Sprung Construction built Marczyk’s stores at 770 E. 17th Ave. and 5100 E. Colfax Ave, as well as the grocer’s Park Hill commissary kitchen. Marczyk’s wife has also worked with Sprung.
“We have 70 years of combined history with this guy,” Marczyk said. “He’s true blue. Starts early, finishes late. He gets it, especially the qualitative aspect of what we’re trying to achieve here.”
The low-labor model also is what got Marczyk on board, especially as Denver restaurants contend with high minimum wages, property taxes and other expenses like paid family leave and composting. He called those costs “excessive social overhead.”
“We really built this to be a really tight crew because if you own a business you’ve got to pay for everyone’s everything,” he said. “Thatap a big driver of automation and the cooking process.”
That plan is what enabled Marczyk to take his burgers from intermittent summer nights to full-time.
“On a busy night we’ll do 400 burgers over two hours. I can’t replicate that. There’s no scale to that whatsoever,” he said. “But now, we can do it in a less frenetic way.”
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