Tim Recher, Executive Chef, Frenchman’s Creek Beach and Country Club
Burgers have played a special role in Tim Recher’s culinary journey, which began as a grill cook at TGI Fridays and has led to his current role as Executive Chef of Frenchman’s Creek Beach and Country Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
“There were seven burgers on the menu, one for each day of the week. It was 30 years ago,” he says, “but still, I could tell you the exact spec on every single one of those burgers.”
Today, Recher, CEC, AAC, MWMCS, CWX, maintains that having a “world-class burger” is incredibly important, particularly as the club gears up to open a new sports bar this fall, alongside three other new dining venues.
“We certainly will have a great burger,” he says, “but I thought [we should have] a couple of different kinds of burgers. I wanted to have some fun with it.”
Among the options in the running for the dining venue’s opening menu is the Reuben smashburger, a play on the classic sandwich, which Recher ran as a special at the club’s casual restaurant for about five days.
“I like to do a lot of butchery, so I end up with a lot of trim, and I was trying to come up with ways to use it,” explains Recher. “It was very popular.”
For new recipes, Recher finds inspiration online, particularly through social media, whether from a chef down the road or at a club across the country. His R&D time varies for each recipe. But for specials, he has a certain routine.
Frenchman’s Creek Beach and Country Club salmon burger
“Sometimes it’ll hit right away. But usually it’ll take a couple tries,” he says. “For specials, we’re documenting the recipe, we’re weighing it all out; we’re doing all the background, logistical stuff we have to do to create a dish. We’ll make it and run it as a special for four or five days. Each night I’ll take notes on it, and we’ll adjust it from there.”
Frenchman’s Creek Beach and Country Club In-N-Out-inspired smashburger
Other recipes Recher’s tested and refined include a bratwurst burger, a lamb burger, a Cuban burger (pictured above) and an In-N-Out-inspired smashburger.
“It was our version of a ‘Double-Double’ from In-N-Out,” he says: “two smash patties, shredded iceberg, housemade bread and butter pickles, and what we called ‘awesome sauce,’ our own burger fry sauce. We stacked it really high on a brioche bun with double cheese and caramelized onion.”
While Recher appreciates a smashburger, personally, he prefers a thicker burger, ideally with American cheese on a potato bun.
“I want it to be a good half-pound, eight-ounce burger because I like my burgers medium-rare, and I want them to be juicy,” he says. “And I don’t want it to be like sausage or meatball, where it’s packed too tight.”
In addition to beef, a seafood burger option is all but required at Frenchman’s Creek, whether it’s salmon, tuna, or shrimp, he says. One of his favorites was a Florida Gulf shrimp and Florida grouper burger with a mango-and-rum BBQ sauce.
However, Recher says he doesn’t think of himself as a particularly creative chef.
Click the photo for the full recipe for Frenchman’s Creek Beach and Country Club’s Florida Gulf shrimp and grouper burger.
“I think I’m a pretty good craftsman, but I think there are very few chefs who actually create food,” he says. “I’ve just taken flavor profiles that have worked and stood the test of time and tried to find a way to make it current and fun.”
Scottie-Style
Sliders are big—so to speak—at Hackensack Golf Club in Emerson, N.J.
The club sets up a Friday afternoon slider station with a tried-and-true recipe loosely based on White Manna’s, a popular local burger joint.
“We get a blend of meat from one of our butchers,” notes Executive Chef Lawrence Knapp, who’s in his tenth season at the club. “It’s chuck, brisket, and short rib blend, and we do it smashburger-style. We smash it, get a nice crust on it, then season it with simple salt and pepper.”
Scottie-style sliders at Hackensack Golf Club
Knapp finds typical slider rolls too small, so he opts for a dinner potato roll. The club’s full-sized burger, meanwhile, features an onion brioche bun, plus white onion, American cheese and ‘Hack sauce,’ the club’s version of Big Mac sauce.
At Hackensack, the dinner menu features the classics, Knapp says, plus 10-12 different specials per week.
“We’ll change some things seasonally on our classics menu, but a lot of the changes happen on our specials. That’s how we do it here because I tried to change out some classics, and there was a revolt,” he jokes.
Ultimately, though, Knapp has the members’ trust.
Lawrence Knapp, Executive Chef, Hackensack Golf Club
“They’re very receptive to our menus, our changes, different events we do,” he says. “They’re quite supportive of everything we try.”
During Masters Week, the club ran cheeseburger sliders, Scottie-style, named for Scottie Scheffler. The special, based on Schleffler’s menu items at the Masters Champions Dinner, features fries atop the burger (plus Hack sauce, at Hackensack).
“We took a little liberty on the picture that we saw,” notes Knapp, adding that the most popular side that week was chipotle-lime sweet potatoes.
Personally, Knapp prefers something more “old school,” he says: a bacon cheeseburger.
“I think if you put too much on it, it doesn’t taste like a burger anymore; it tastes like the toppings,” he adds. “I like the smashburger because it gets a nice caramelization. The biggest problem is if there’s too much bread.”
Fat Is King
When Farmington Country Club (Charlottesville, Va.) opened its 10th Tee Snack Bar for the season, it used the opportunity to highlight a menu item that would officially debut at the club’s newly renovated dining venue, The Grill, set to open five days later.
Farmington CC’s Korean BBQ smashburger
The pop-up menu included three smashburgers, all atop potato buns: the Farmington (a simple smashburger with cheese), the Alabama (American cheese, sliced pickles, diced yellow onions, Alabama white sauce) and the new Korean BBQ smashburger, which features gochujang aioli, kimchi, grilled scallions and sesame seeds.
“The first day [saw little] volume with the Korean smashburger,” says Executive Sous Chef Wesley Jessee, who joined Farmington in 2023 after 12 years at the Greenbrier. “But after a couple of people tried it and told their buddies how good it was, it flipped from maybe 10% Korean BBQ smashburger sales that Friday to close to 75% of sales on Sunday.”
R&D for the Korean BBQ smashburger was a collaborative effort, Jessee notes.
“With the gochujang aioli, there was some R&D with ratios,” he says, “playing around with flavor profiles. At one point, we added some lime juice to it. We tried it with sesame seeds and without. We ended up taking the sesame seeds out of the aioli and sprinkling them on top as we plate it. With the Korean BBQ sauce, again, there was a lot of R&D involved. Chef Ava [Claros-Melara, Chef de Cuisine of The Grill] and I both worked on recipes, we compared them, and we found a solution that we all liked.”
Farmington CC’S 10th Tee Snack Bar
The new grill is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week; since the remodel and reopening on April 3, Jessee says, there’s not been a slow day yet. In addition to smashburgers, The Grill has several other burger options, including an eight-ounce, grass-fed burger that’s produced locally.
The Grill is, of course, not the only venue to menu a quality burger. The burger in the club’s fine dining restaurant, the Blue Ridge Room, features a Fresno chili and bacon jam, Tillamook white cheddar cheese, fresh arugula, a sliced heirloom tomato, and a toasted potato bun, served with truffle fries.
Meanwhile, Mondays are $5 burger nights at Farmington, a longtime tradition that the team hasn’t yet dared to adjust for inflation. Covers on burger nights typically average around 200.
Personally, Jessee says he likes a potato bun for a better bread-to-meat ratio, and he’s “a sucker for a good American cheese,” followed by a sharp cheddar.
But overall, he says, the key to a good burger is in the fat ratio.
“Fat equals flavor,” he says. “And the grind [is important, too]. Usually, burger patties are ground at least twice. My preference is three times, so they mold well and hold their shape and their structure. But fat is king.”
