In the Burguer de Pedroca in Lawndale, the pendulum of the hamburger has left the lace and gossamer empanadas of The Smashburger to such a thick creation that you will need to separate the lower half of your jaw to consume it.
And they are not just the empanadas. Each hamburger is a tower reclined with meat, cheese and vegetables, some built with layers of ham and bacon, grated chicken and a fried egg. The buns fight to contain their content, appearing swollen and ready to dirty the table, their lap and its shirt.
In the last five years, the chef and owner Pedro Carvalho has become the great explanator of the Brazilian hamburger, in a search to present Los Angeles to this version of his favorite sandwich.
When Carvalho moved to the United States in 2016, the hamburgers he ate in his hometown of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais in southeast of Brazil was lost.
There, meat empanadas were stacked with fried potatoes and corn, and the buns joined in a pink mayonnaise pink sauce. The hamburgers came well wrapped in small plastic bags that had a double purpose: they made hamburgers easier to transport and easier to eat without making a disaster.
A burger from Burguer de Pedroca in Lawndale.
(Pedro Carvalho)
“Each hamburger comes with corn and potato sticks, and the special homemade mayonnaise,” says Carvalho. “It's like a great hamburger. We call it could, a large and dirty meal. “
In February 2020, Carvalho was working as an Uber delivery driver when he decided to make his own version of Brazilian hamburgers at home. His Brazilian friends realized when he began publishing his hamburgers with potato and corn sticks on Instagram.
“Many friends asked me where they could buy hamburgers because we don't have Brazilian hamburgers in Los Angeles,” he says. “I wanted to bring a sample of Brazil here.”
A year later, Carvalho began cooking his hamburgers in a shared kitchen space in the Brazilian shopping center, a shopping center that houses multiple Brazilian businesses in Culver City.
Pedro Carvalho outside his Lawndale Burguer Restaurant in Pedroca. Celebrate the first anniversary of the restaurant in March.
(Pedro Carvalho)
He was able to build a stable business of other Brazilians who were looking for a home sample. He spent a couple of years cooking there before pausing for mental health reasons.
“I didn't feel good, I was depressed, but the Brazilian community, many of them already knew and missed my hamburgers,” he says.
He found a small store in a shopping center in Lawndale and opened Pedroca's darquer in the spring of 2024. He is named after the childhood nickname that his godparents gave him in Brazil.
“It's like little Pedro,” he says.
Pedroca is a small space that exudes a great personality, with yellow and green walls covered with several Brazilian paraphernalia. There is a signed shirt of the Brazilian national team of Douglas Costa; Each table is adorned with a mini Brazilian and American flag; You can have Brazilian football or music on television; And the refrigerator is full of Antarctic Guaraná, a flavor of Guaraná from Brazil that knows a mixture between apple cider and ginger beer.
Like the hamburgers you can find in the hometown of Carvalho, their Brazilian hamburgers feel comfortably in small plastic bags, full of small potato fried potatoes and corn grains.
On a recent visit, I look at the comrades of the diners. The brave are grabbing their wrapped plastic hamburgers, exchanging snaps with napkin blows. Others are cutting their hamburgers with a knife. Everyone has pink sauce in the corners of their mouths.
Carvalho admits that his hamburgers are larger than those he grew up eating, but he expects size to help him distinguish in a city full of Smashburgers.
The burger X-Raposão de Burguer de Pedrocue in Lawndale comes with two empanadas of meat, cheese, a fried egg, fried sausages, ham, bacon, grated chicken, corn, potato sticks, lettuce, tomatoes and pink sauce.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
“We know that Smashburgers are really popular here, so we wanted to think about doing something different,” he says. “They all ask me: 'How?'”
You squeeze.
My hamburger Picanha has at least 6 inches long, with a mound of upper grilled sirloin (Picanha) at the bottom, sprinkled in a green onion and bright green onion sauce. In the upper part there is a pile of crispy potato bars, green leaf and sliced tomato lettuce. The final layer is a canned corn ball in a puddle of the Carvalho version of Thousand Isand Dressing called “Special Salsa”.
I squeeze a corner and then bordering. Existentate another corner and then bite again. I begin to understand the importance of plastic bags.
“All my life in Brazil, as with this bag,” he says. “These bags are very difficult to find, and we have to bring them from Brazil. We get them every time we return or my family comes here. When I know someone comes here, I tell you to bring more bags for me. “
The x-raposão is the strongest hamburger of the menu, stacked with two beef empanadas of 6 ounces covered with mozzarella cheese, corn, potato sticks, sliced ham, grated chicken breast, lettuce, chopped fried rounds of fried sausage, a fried egg, sliced tomato, bacchus and “special sauce.”
It is the length of an underwater sandwich.
Unless you can disarm your jaw, the X-Raposão is a bifurcation and knife hamburger. While obtaining some of the potato sticks and corn in each bite, there is enough lubrication and variable textures to carry it through the many layers of pork, beef and chicken. Each component is cooking individually on the grill, empanadas hamburgers with crunchy edges, properly caramelized round sausages, crunchy bacon and egg a couple of past seconds.
It will stretch its mental and physical capacity of textures in a single bite. But if you are ever crushed fries in a delicatessen sandwich, the sensation is immediately familiar.
“It's not easy to understand flavors,” says Carvalho. “It's like night food, very popular in Brazil when you leave clubs.”
The churrasco hamburger of Burguer de Pedroca in Lawndale comes with sausages, bacon, cheese, barbecue sauce, dust cassava and a thick vinaigrette.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles)
For those looking for a more manageable bite, gourmet hamburgers are served vertical, wrapped in paper in a basket. The unanimous favorite on the table was Churrasco, Carvalho's interpretation of a Brazilian barbecue dish in a bow.
An empanada of beef is placed with sweet and smoked caullable sausage and bacon strips. For the cheese element, Carvalho ASA thick coal slabs, a firm Brazilian cheese with a squeaky texture similar to Hallumi. It sprinkles a little lamp, the yucca dust typically served with grill meat, rice and beans dishes. The hamburger is dressed in a thick vinaigrette, almost in pickle, Carvalho's marks with chopped tomato, onion, pepper, oil and vinegar. It is finished with an American barbecue sauce drizzle.
“It's good to see him following his dreams,” says Thiago Carvalho, Pedro's brother who helps him direct the restaurant. “Many people did not believe in him. They told him that he would never work, but he works very hard and is never satisfied. I know that once you get another location, you will look for another. ”
After the one -year anniversary of the restaurant, Carvalho is looking at a store in Hollywood, where he plans to attract the multitude after the club and be open until late. And once he assures that place, he says that he will look for another.
“Every week by week we have more Americans,” he says. “We just want everyone to try this.”
