What has wagyu beef, bacon jam, onions, and white American cheese with Duke’s mayonnaise on a Martin’s potato roll? According to our readers, the very best burger in Northern Virginia. Out of 32 possible victors, beef devotees named the OooMami Smash Burger the winner of our NoVA Wars: Burger Edition.
The lovably greasy leader isn’t just any burger — it’s a fine-dining burger, the brainchild of Field & Main’s Neal Wavra and his team. The OooMami Smash Burger was created in 2019 to replace the previous burger that chef-owner Wavra sold at his then three-year-old Marshall restaurant.
“We started playing with ideas and smash burgers became the topic of conversation,” Wavra recalls.
Field & Main was already working with Ovoka Farm, a Paris wagyu cattle breeder that supplies the restaurant with exceptionally well-marbled, round-flavored beef. At the time, Joffre Reyes, now chef de cuisine, was working on a bacon jam recipe. Instead of relying on tomatoes, which can’t be obtained locally year-round, Reyes added soy sauce and pickled shiitake mushrooms to ground bacon. The resulting condiment, Wavra says, touches on all five basic tastes, particularly sour and umami.
Wavra jokes that because of the restaurant’s tagline, “comfortable, refined, quality local food and drink,” it steered away from déclassé yellow cheese in favor of white American slices. With a little bit of mayonnaise to further amplify the fatty flavors, the ingredients are then plopped on a soft potato bun.
How popular is it? Wavra says that with 300 to 450 dinner guests most weeks, Field & Main sells 60 to 70 burgers. After Burger Wars began, that went up to more like 150. “People doing the tasting menu often slide it in as an extra course,” he says.
To celebrate Field & Main’s victory, the restaurant offered a pop-up burger night with all proceeds benefitting the Fauquier Community Food Bank. That August evening, it sold 126 burgers in two hours, 38 of which were doubles.
The burger is on the menu as an appetizer, but don’t feel ashamed to visit the restaurant and have a double for your main course — just order it with another starter, the loaded crispy potatoes. Together, the dishes create a meal that may be inspired by fast food but couldn’t be further from it in terms of quality.
“It was a really remarkable testament to the community Field & Main has built that a small restaurant out in Marshall can be the top burger in Northern Virginia,” Wavra says. 8369 W. Main St., Marshall
Feature image by Shannon Ayres
This story originally ran in our October issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
