North Brooklyn is getting another burger joint: a spot on Meserole Street is set to be the East Williamsburg location of smash burger startup Flat Out Burger (151 Meserole St.). Flat Out will soft open the new location by the end of this month, along with a bar co-located inside.

The Meserole storefront is the former home of Graham Bar, which closed in September 2025, per North Brooklyn Dispatch.

“We are a community brand. We really are for the community, and I think that’s important,” said Madison Makula, who handles marketing for Flat Out and associated companies.

I asked Makula what that looks like. How can a burger be community?

Makula told me, “It’s really high quality, and it’s really good. And it’s one of those spots that’s open late at night, so you can go out to drinks, out to dinner with your friends, and we’ll still be there.” Flat Out’s aspirations are more humble than critical darling Nowon (436 Jefferson St.), which has since expanded to Boston after opening their second location in Bushwick.

In January, Flat Out also applied for a liquor license (listed principals include Anthony Santorelli). Per Madison, Flat Out’s East Williamsburg location will also have a bar called Grandma’s Tavern, completing a trio of other Freudian bars on Graham, including Mother’s (347 Graham Ave.) and Mommy’s (323 Graham Ave.).

Flat Out opened its first location in Bed-Stuy (199 Malcolm X Blvd.) in June 2025, equidistant from the Gates J and Utica A/C stations. This year, Flat Out expanded into LES in June and Connecticut in August. Aside from some buzz in Connecticut, Flat Out has received little coverage, beyond a brief review from the Infatuation.

“What we do is we have a very quiet, soft opening. We really don’t announce it,” Makula told me. “We really try to be super organic and just have a natural reaction from people.”

I asked Makula about Flat Out’s parent company, the Westchester-based TRG Equities, which brands itself as a “full-service, privately held real estate acquisition, development, and management company.” One of its principals is Anthony Santorelli.

Madison said, “I think it’s supposed to be under wraps.”

While public documents do not list TRG of 151 Meserole, they do own the Bed-Stuy building that houses the original Flat Out, along with a sleekly marketed laundromat nearby called Lazy Sunday (197 Malcolm X Blvd.), which, per Makula, will soon have a coffee bar, because we all want nothing more than to linger at a laundromat.

TRG purchased the buildings in February 2025, along with a multifamily unit at 59-29 Myrtle Ave in Ridgewood. Purchase documents for 199 Malcolm X list it as being 199 Malcolm X AMS LLC and TRG Management. AMS is a Fort Lee, NJ-domiciled “vertically integrated real estate company” that Santorelli lists as his employer on LinkedIn (Flat Out did not respond to a followup about TRG Equities’ other businesses dealings in North Brooklyn and Ridgewood.)

Flat Out Burger and Lazy Sunday both have approachable, pastel marketing that only occasional lapses into AI-generated marketing collateral (see here and here). They’re not reinventing the wheel either, but trying instead to repaint it.

They’re branches of a white-owned pseudo-PE company that is buying property and setting up shop on Malcolm X. Personally, I often walk down Malcolm X and feel out of place because of how I blend in so perfectly in wintertime. Life must be a horror movie for those who’ve been here the longest. I’m waiting for the day when someone arrives fresh and ready to lobby for the street to be renamed Childish Gambino Boulevard so some of us can feel more welcomed.

Culturally, Flat Out is the production of a new (in name only) concept based on tired ideas historicized and perfected by George Motz at SoHo’s Hamburger America. This is yet another iteration of 7th Street Burger, an attempt to respond to Californian nostalgia for In-N-Out Burger, evident in its similarly spartan menu. Its first and primal item is the “Flat Out Classic,” made with “Grilled onions, American cheese, pickles & signature sauce.” Its only variations are vegetarian and high-protein turkey alternatives of the same thing. 

The Oklahoma onion burger was originally called the Depression burger, per J. Kenji López-Alt. It was made to deprive Okies of protein as they were getting dust bowled out of town on the way to California. Nationally, the smash burger has arrived in comparably distressing times.

Our dominant mode of burger is derived from a mashed and burned ration. We now fetishize a regular-sized burger as having a ‘bistro-’ or ‘pub-like’ quality. Both of those modifiers express a nostalgia for the millennial kitsch and decadence of bistro-burger/microbrewery against which the smash burger defines itself.

Frederic Jameson saw in postmodernism “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense.” More locally, the Infatuation’s Bryan Kim writes, “Same-ification is coming for you.” Flat Out represents endless variations on the same things. Kim adds, “Patronize your little neighborhood spots before it’s too late.”

We now have the same masquerading as the innocuous and the local, aided and abetted by media the Infatuation, whose relentless scoring and gridded visuals both represent a pseudo-critical eye that flattens culinary expression into rigorous boxes meant to be checked (off and tried and rated and forgotten like road trip pit stops).

In historically Black deep Bed-Stuy, the presence of a place like Flat Out at least comes across as gauche, if not so obviously symbolic as to feel comic and cheap. But at least East Williamsburg is more of an appropriate place for these things. It is a place in the middle stages of trend servitude. Amid aggressive development, it increasingly exhibits a financial “architecture of places we don’t want to be in and don’t wish to remember,” as Allison Hewitt Ward writes for NYRA. It’s a neighborhood where a Variety Coffee (368 Graham Ave.) makes complete sense, where a discrete chain like Flat Out can link to the earth, where you find things like Casa Cugine (427 Graham Ave.), owned by Danny Mondello, who is very famous on TikTok for wanting to fuck his sandwiches.

There’s a rote duplicity to all businesses. Some shamelessly peddle slop, sell beer to genocidaires, or just fuck around for the hell of it. Flat Out/TRG’s duplicity is baked into its nature; in that way, they might not be blamed for a quality intrinsic to a vertically integrated business with no visible ties to the community.

Their business model is alarming insofar as our physical places—our neighborhoods—are now prime and fertile ground for mid-tier players to assert themselves.

In Michael Calderone’s meditation in Curbed on the closing of Music Hall of Williamsburg, he quotes Alex Beard, a Brooklyn VP for RIPCO Real Estate, who says, “Live music does not work at 400 bucks a foot… Few things do. You’ve got to be selling very expensive, very nice stuff.” The real estate landscape east of Williamsburg is increasingly rejecting coffee shops and vegan restaurants like invasive parasites.

While TRG is no Apollo Global Management, deep North Brooklyn can now sustain larger predators. The story of Flat Out/TRG is iterated endlessly and everywhere. Economies of scale will always dominate and distort any semblance of competition. The end state of the current retail landscape is Infinite West Village/Williamsburg, branching each from its original geographies before it might hopefully relent, or at least reassess, by the time a Wonder opens outside Broadway Junction, where Pura Vida might do wellness shot popups.

Now imagine a hamburger: stacked and organized and mashed down by American hands and driven into a motherless maw to be gnashed by licked teeth. Imagine a hamburger because the hamburger is America’s greatest analogy.