I was walking around Wynwood one night when I spotted a guy holding a paper bag with a drawing of an old-timey soda fountain worker in a bow tie, offering a smile and a wink. It’s the logo from the hot TikTok spot of the moment.
When I told him I’d been wanting to try the place, he turned my way, sleepy-eyed. “Dude, these are so good,” he said, the vowels so drawn out they became their own sentence.
This was an IRL version of the hype surrounding Skinny Louie, which has been getting a lot of love from the influencers (e.g. “It’s thick and rich like me”). This explains why Skinny Louie often sports a long line down a block full of good restaurants.
So I got there early one day, just after Skinny Louie opened at a wide-eyed-for-Wynwood 11 in the morning. Uber Eats drivers idled near their scooters. Inside, a gaggle of employees crowded a kitchen so narrow a naked John Cena would need to maneuver sideways.
Skinny Louie is the creation of Gonzalo Rubino and Matias Palloni of Crazy Poke and Sushi Mas. The simple, late-night smashburger joint serves just seven items: three burgers, three shakes and fries. Aside from an Impossible Meat option, there are no substitutions and no secret menu items—smart, especially when considering Skinny Louie’s rowdy 2am crowd.
We unwrapped our burgers on one of the lipstick-red tables outside, a Motown soundtrack adding something celebratory to all that hype. We spilled out the fries, salty and not unlike the ones at McD’s but with flecks of skin, fluffier insides and a whole lot more crunch. Good fries.
The shakes—we got Cookies and Cream and Choco Brownie—were a nice balance of creamy and not too sweet, bits of brownie just nearly getting stuck in the fat straw. Chasing a fry with a sip of chocolate shake immediately transports you back to fast-food restaurant booths with Grandpa.
As for the burgers, the Skinny Louie comes with extra cheese and griddled onions, but I went with a double Classic Burger, which adds a tomato slice, a few shards of lettuce, raw chopped onion, ketchup and a generous splat of yellow mustard. My better half got the much more petite and veggie-free single Applewood Bacon Burger for $8.49. Get a double, we learned.
These are tasty burgers. The best smash burgers in Miami? Nah. Ted’s crisps up the edges of the patties better. The USBS buns take the win on fluffiness. And Babe’s patties are wonderfully beefier.
But you’ll be glad you got a Skinny Louie, especially if it’s after the staff at Gramp’s has broken out the mops. Because life is short, and before the seas rise, eating a cheesy smashburger with salty fries and a chocolate shake is one of those finer pleasures—especially for the not-very-sober.
