Frankburgers are available at Sam’s Meat Warehouse in Florida, just outside Warwick. The butcher shop and specialty meat market has become well known throughout the region for premium steaks, custom cuts, holiday specials, and increasingly, its now-famous burgers. Customers can contact the store directly at (845) 651-6328 for availability, grilling packs, and specialty orders. Hours of operation vary seasonally, with expanded traffic typically surrounding holidays and summer grilling weekends.
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Skip the Coupons. Warwick Already Has a Champion.
By Kat Leslie
Every May, the internet fills with the same annual flood of National Hamburger Day promotions.
National Hamburger Day falls this Thursday, May 28, bringing with it the expected avalanche of fast-food giveaways, and “free burger with purchase” deals from national chains eager to remind America that processed beef discs still qualify as a food group.
Free burgers. Dollar burgers. Buy-one-get-one burgers. Rewards-app burgers. Burgers assembled by corporations that spent more time designing the coupon than the sandwich itself.
But around Warwick and neighboring communities, locals already know where the real burger pilgrimage leads.
Not to an app.
Not to a drive-thru.
And certainly not to a burger assembled by somebody wearing a headset and emotional exhaustion.
And while there is certainly nothing wrong with a free burger from a drive-thru window at 11:30 p.m., Orange County residents already know something the national chains keep trying to engineer in focus groups:
The best burgers are still local.
They are the ones cooked by people who actually care about them.
The ones served by restaurants that know their customers by name instead of account number.
And around Warwick, few culinary arguments spark more passionate debate than where to find the region’s best burger.
Some swear by the tavern-style classics at longtime local pubs. Others lean toward smoky backyard-style burgers from smaller roadside joints or restaurants quietly grinding their own beef in-house.
Among the names that repeatedly surface in local conversations:
- Yesterdays Pub and Grill
- Prime 36
- Big Bear Burgers
- Mattingly’s Tavern
- Galloway Grill
- Eddie’s Roadhouse
All have loyal followings. All make strong cases.
But if there were a heavyweight title belt for burgers in the Warwick Valley, many locals would quietly tell you it belongs to one name:
The Frankburger.
Crafted at Sam’s Meat Warehouse, the now locally legendary burger has quietly developed a reputation less like a menu item and more like a heavyweight title holder — the boss, the champion, the burger other burgers complain about behind its back.
Part burger. Part engineering project. Part edible philosophy.
The “Frank” in Frankburger is not accidental. The burger’s name pays tribute to longtime Warwick community radio owner and food connoisseur Frank Truatt, whose collaboration, personality, and local-food enthusiasm played a major role in shaping both the burger and the culture surrounding it. Friends and customers say Truatt’s influence helped turn the project from simply another premium burger into something distinctly local — part food item, part Orange County folklore.
Stephen Kitar, one of the creators behind the Frankburger phenomenon, describes the burger with the kind of technical precision usually reserved for aerospace engineering or illegal European sports cars.
“The biggest mistake people make is thinking a burger is just ground beef,” Kitar said. “It’s fat composition, heat management, texture, timing, and structural integrity all working together.”
According to Kitar, one of the Frankburger’s secrets involves blending fats with different melting points to create slower, staged juice release during cooking rather than losing moisture all at once. Wagyu genetics also play a major role in the burger’s flavor profile and texture.
“Wagyu marbling behaves differently under heat,” he explained. “That changes everything from mouthfeel to flavor delivery.”
Then there is the bun — a detail Kitar insists most restaurants disastrously underestimate.
“The bun is not decoration. It’s the vessel for the main ingredient,” he said, strongly recommending brioche buns capable of handling the burger’s juice load without collapsing halfway through what has become, for many customers, a borderline spiritual experience.
Cooking technique matters too.
Kitar recommends cooking burgers hot enough to develop a sear while resisting the urge to constantly press or flatten the meat — a practice he compares to “actively squeezing the flavor into the fire.”
A proper Frankburger, he says, should develop a crust while retaining internal moisture and structure.
Which helps explain why locals increasingly talk about the burger the way boxing fans once discussed heavyweight champions.
Not merely good.
Dominant.
And perhaps that is why local burgers still beat national chains.
Because the best burgers are not manufactured by marketing departments.
They are built obsessively by people who argue about fat ratios, bun structure, heat retention, cattle genetics, and juice migration like NASA engineers trapped inside a backyard barbecue.
Which, in Warwick, may honestly be the purest definition of craftsmanship left, and the highest compliment possible.
