Otto Zizak brings his award-winning deep-fried hamburgers to Staten Island

by Jessica Jones-Gorman • Photos By Alex Barreto

For Otto Zizak, the key to a good burger isn’t just a grilled-to-perfection patty or smoked Berkshire bacon, caramelized onion, and spicy garlic aioli. It’s the tasty, fluffy, and fried Hungarian flatbread wrapped around the entire 10-ounce creation that really counts.

“First we grill the grass-fed meat to temperature, top it according to the order, then wrap the burger in a rising eastern European dough and deep fry the whole thing,” Zizak explained, detailing a laborious process that has garnered his Brooklyn and Staten Island restaurants some serious New York street cred.

“It requires a bit of skill; my wife makes the dough every morning for all of our restaurants; it needs to be rolled out very thin and then closed carefully so there’s no leakage,” Zizak continued. “It’s a very important, sometimes temperamental element, and if it’s not done just right, the whole burger won’t work.”

But work it does. Zizak and wife Maria have been concocting the deliciously deep fried burgers at Korzo in Park Slope since 2006 and recently opened a near copy of the popular Brooklyn restaurant in Staten Island, called Korzo Klub.

“This is a growing community, reminiscent of what Brooklyn was 10 years ago,” the owner said, describing the space he now occupies on Bay Street that formerly housed French-American restaurant, Zest. “It’s affordable but still close to the city, and I felt it could use a little spark. We’ve been open for eight weeks now and the neighborhood feedback has been wonderful.”

For Zizak, who immigrated to Brooklyn from Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s and started working in the hospitality industry as a bartender and waiter, the success of his restaurants and his award-winning burgers are the culmination of years of hard work.

Korzo opened at a time when its Brooklyn neighborhood was growing and transitioning, which Zizak says undeniably contributed to its success. That led to the opening of Zizak’s second restaurant, The Brooklyn Beet Company, in Bay Ridge.

“That’s a slightly different concept,” Zizak said. “Where we make our beet ketchup and other specialty condiments,” adding that he launched the new business since one of the only elements he wasn’t making in-house was ketchup.

“We were using Heinz, just like everyone else,” he explained. “And we decided we wanted something with a unique twist. We went through all of the different fruits and vegetables, trying to come up with something that was naturally sweet. We found that when you roast beets in the oven, their natural sugars multiply and caramelize nicely, so we decided to make ketchup out of them.”

Every Brooklyn Beet Company product is made in its home borough, and features New York State veggies that are slow-roasted, never boiled. It is then blended with over 20 Eastern European-themed botanicals and without any processed sweeteners.

“We find it makes a nice pairing with our fried burgers,” Zizak said.

“Customers seem to like what we’re doing,” Zizak concluded. “We’re playing off the vibrancy of this neighborhood, adding our own flavor to it while respecting what already exists here.”

Zizak has even teamed up with nearby Flagship Brewery to create a special Korzo ale, which can be found exclusively in his restaurants.

“It’s a hoppy ale, amber and crisp, that we concocted together with the owners of Flagship,” the owner concluded. “It goes perfectly with our burgers and makes great use of local resources. That’s what Korzo has been about since the very beginning.”

Korzo Klub
977 Bay Street / 718.541.4692
korzorestaurant.com