Chef O’Connell reimagines the cheeseburger as an empanada
Empanadas, in their purest form, are a kind of edible envelope: a sealed pocket of comfort, engineered to travel. Burgers, meanwhile, are designed to stay put — a stacked, drippy monument to right now. So when the Langham Huntington’s Tap Room decided to mark Pasadena Cheeseburger Week with “cheeseburger empanadas,” it wasn’t just jumping on the annual local bandwagon. It was proposing a theory.
Namely: the cheeseburger is no longer a single object. It’s a set of flavors — a profile — that can be dismantled and rebuilt in endless configurations. A burger can be a burger, sure. But it can also be an idea.
That’s where Executive Chef Chris O’Connell strolls in, with something he describes as “a little twist on” the classic. “It’s basically, I call it my animal style empanada,” O’Connell said — an empanada built around “a lot of the flavor profiles that you would get in” a burger. He paused, laughing a little at the cultural weight of the phrase, adding, “I mean, I dunno if they have a trademark, but yeah.”
The Tap Room has set a high bar in past Cheeseburger Week showings — memorable enough that we couldn’t help recalling a cheeseburger one year out on the terrace by the Langham pool, a burger which was extraordinary.
O’Connell seems to relish that pressure. “Good,” he replied. But rather than attempt to out-muscle last year’s greatness with sheer size or seriousness, he took another route: “something just a little bit more whimsical and fun.”
That whimsy, he explained, isn’t accidental. “I just always try to think outside the box,” he said. “And I love burgers. I am not going to go drive 40 miles to get a burger, but I love burgers.”
What’s striking here is the way O’Connell frames the empanada not as a gimmick, but as a candidate for permanence. It’s something he’s “contemplating on putting on a menu here permanently someday,” he said, when the Tap Room eventually retools.
He’s played with the concept before — “I’ve done it for VIP… maybe an order for a banquet” — but never as a restaurant item. The finishing touch is the chef’s own playful escalation of a familiar burger cornerstone: “I do a Thousand Island, and I beef it up… I call it ‘10,000 Island.’”
For Cheeseburger Week, that’s the point: not just to eat the burger, but to reimagine what a burger can be — right down to the last sealed edge.
