Superiority Burger

Brooks Headley builds his burger out of quinoa, chickpeas, carrots and walnuts, and he cooks it inside the old Odessa, the Ukrainian late-night diner where people landed for tuna melts and stuffed cabbage after shows at A7. The MICHELIN Guide carries the room at Bib Gourmand.

Why go

Headley opened around the corner in 2015 in a space small enough that the line went round the block, and he moved into Odessa's room without gutting it. The worn leather booths stayed. So did the stuffed cabbage, rebuilt with sticky rice and earthy mushrooms in place of the beef.3 Headley came out of that scene himself, a hardcore drummer who turned pastry chef, so the lineage on this corner runs from the club to the diner to him, and the gelato and the dessert specials are where the pastry half shows. Everything on the menu is vegetarian and much of it is vegan, and the example the guide's inspector picks out is beans with escarole, provolone and pickled jalapenos.1

Order this / avoid

Order: the collard greens sandwich, sesame focaccia around seasoned greens and sharp cheddar. Then the roasted white sweet potato under green sauce, labneh and pickles, which Talreja tells you flatly to get. The yuba-verde puts chewy tofu skin, chickpeas and broccoli rabe on a baguette and carries a menu note apologizing for what premium yuba costs.
Order: whatever the savoury special is that day, which is Eater's standing advice on this room, and the fries with it.7
Order late: off the small heated case at the end of the counter, which fills after midnight with vegan Cornish pasties and pre-wrapped Night Burgers.4
Avoid: the busted beans. Talreja found them watery and flavorless, and the sesame bread stick beside them too hard to dip.

What locals & experts say

Neha Talreja, The Infatuation, 22 September 2023, rating 8.5: the kitchen supplements its culty vegan burgers with oddball experiments in diner-friendly vegetarian comfort food. Not every experiment works perfectly, but the ones that do keep us coming back.3
Talreja on the burger itself: she says the patty falls apart after a couple of bites, and that there are far more quinoa burgers around now than when Superiority put its own on a menu.
Pete Wells, reviewing it for The New York Times on 27 June 2023, a Critic's Pick at three stars: Few restaurants would be harder to clone.4
Robert Sietsema, who has covered cheap eating in this city for decades, was there the week the Avenue A room opened for Eater NY on 4 April 2023: the menu was twelve savoury dishes and a vastly expanded dessert list, and the burned broccoli salad had come over from the first room.6
MICHELIN Guide New York: Bib Gourmand, with the inspector describing a menu built around bold seasoning, smart textures and real comfort.1

Good to know

Getting in: the guide records the room as first-come, first-served, and Talreja found nobody hurrying the table once you sit. The restaurant's own site carries live reservation and delivery routes.2
Seats: booths, a soda counter and the back bar, so a solo eater has three ways to sit.
Standing: the guide's own 2025 best-value roster carries the Bib Gourmand, and Ligaya Mishan kept it on the Times' 2026 hundred best.8 5
Read the placemats. They carry ads for East Village businesses that are still trading, a sewing-machine repair shop and a 138-year-old drugstore among them.4

Verdict

must-visit — Bring a skeptic and a vegetarian to the same table here and Headley will feed both of them properly, which is the whole argument for the room. Book through the restaurant's own site, which takes reservations as well as delivery.

Superiority Burger.