Anthony Valinoti is known for his pizza. He opened Deluca’s in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 2013, and it soon became a cult favorite for its thin, crispy, flirting-the-line-of-burnt brick oven–baked pies. The restaurant was so successful that in 2024 Valinoti opened a branch in Little Rock, too, and there’s still a line out the door there pretty much nightly. But there’s something else on the Deluca’s menu that might just be better than the pizza.
Valinoti, a larger-than-life New York character who makes everyone he encounters feel like an immediate friend, still laughs when he tells the origin story of his delightfully named “spiteburger.” It was lunchtime on a Monday about seven years ago, and he’d gone to a restaurant (that will remain unnamed) in Hot Springs, desperate for a cheeseburger and a beer. He asked them to cook it medium rare—and they said no. “The meat was frozen, so they said they had to cook it medium well. I offered to sign a waiver. I begged. I tried everything,” he remembers. When they still refused, Valinoti left and vowed to make it himself and put it on the menu at Deluca’s. “The person I was talking to probably thought I was some kind of lunatic, and I am, but that was the impetus for me to make the perfect cheeseburger.”
Spite aside, the ingredients are basic. “I want three things in a cheeseburger: meat, cheese, and a bun, none of these secret sauces and a hundred toppings,” he says. “Doing something that simple is hard because there’s nowhere to hide.” He started ordering different blends of meat from a butcher in New York until he landed on the perfect dry-aged combo that smelled and tasted more like steak than ground chuck. Next, he found his dream bun—Martin’s potato rolls—which initially his sister bought by the package and FedExed to him because they weren’t available in Arkansas. For the cheese, he stuck to a basic, meltable American slice.
Photo: Courtesy of Deluca’s
Then came experimentation in the kitchen. A cast-iron skillet, which Deluca’s also uses to cook meatballs, proved the perfect vessel. “We put that cast-iron pan in the oven and get it good and hot. We salt the patty—that’s the only seasoning we use. The patty goes in the skillet, we pull the cast-iron out of the oven, and it sears to get an incredible crust. Then we put it back in and time it—three minutes for medium rare, four minutes for medium, five minutes for well done. About a minute and thirty seconds out, we throw the bun in and put the cheese on. When it comes out, we rest it, and then we serve it with a bag of Lay’s potato chips and homemade pickles on the side. That’s it.”
Though Valinoti attributes some of the burger’s deliciousness to the top and bottom heat of his pizza ovens, which get up to 675 degrees, he still has some tips for those in pursuit of the perfect burger in their own kitchens: Get the best meat you can, salt it generously (“don’t miss a crack or crevice),” use a cast-iron skillet, crank your oven up as hot as it will go, and don’t touch it except to flip it to ensure a great crust.
Or, of course, stop by Deluca’s in Hot Springs or Little Rock and sample Valinoti’s version. “The two things that make me happiest in the world are great pizza and great burgers,” he says. “With my spiteburger, I was out to make the best cheeseburger in America, and I think I got pretty close.”
Lindsey Liles joined Garden & Gun in 2020 after completing a master’s in literature in Scotland and a Fulbright grant in Brazil. The Arkansas native is G&G’s digital reporter, covering all aspects of the South, and she especially enjoys putting her biology background to use by writing about wildlife and conservation. She lives on Johns Island, South Carolina.
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