Long Beach Food Scene Week kicks off July 31 and runs through Aug. 9, celebrating our city’s ever-evolving food culture. To uplift our chefs, restaurateurs, managers, bartenders, line cooks, servers, bussers, and everyone else who makes Long Beach hospitality what it is, I will be highlighting specific things happening exclusively this week—like this focus on Proudly Serving.
There is something wonderfully accidental about some of the best parts of Proudly Serving, the mini-burger again founded by Matthew McIvor after he began cooking burgers out of his driveway mid-pandemic.
Its fries—the thick, craggy, battered things that have become nearly as essential to an order as the burger itself—weren’t even the fries owner Matthew McIvor originally intended to serve. Its chili, a deeply spiced, beanless ode to SoCal’s love of Tommy’s-style chili burger culture, was created by a guy who had never actually eaten a chili burger before making his own. They’ve expanded into fish sandwiches, including a stellar tuna melt for Long Beach Food Scene Week. Chicken sandwiches. Collabs…
The burger itself, meanwhile, is the opposite of accidental.
Every detail—from the thickness of the onion to the pickle to the bun to just how far the beef should be smashed—was fixated over before Matthew was willing to sell it. That combination of obsessive tinkering and happy accidents has helped turn Proudly Serving from a scrappy pop-up into a growing South Bay-born burger brand. And now, after years of Matthew wanting to plant a permanent flag in the city where Proudly Serving’s earliest roots took hold, the shop finally has a Long Beach home at Marina Pacifica.
A Long Beach homecoming that is taking time
Proudly Serving’s arrival in Long Beach was, in many ways, a homecoming. Long before the brand grew into permanent locations, Matthew was doing pop-ups in and around Long Beach, cooking burgers and attempting to keep up with fry orders using equipment that now seems comically inadequate for what the business would become.
Its permanent Long Beach location, however, sits in a peculiar corner of the city. Marina Pacifica is one of Long Beach’s more unusual commercial centers: Waterfront-adjacent. Anchored by a movie theater and major retailers. But largely disconnected from the kind of dense pedestrian activity that naturally feeds restaurants in neighborhoods like DTLB, Belmont Shore, or Alamitos Beach.
Matthew is keenly aware of that.
“Long Beach probably is going to take a little bit longer to really build up that customer base,” he said, pointing both to Marina Pacifica’s limited foot traffic and the fact that Proudly Serving is still relatively unfamiliar to many customers on the eastern side of the city. It is an approach that echoes how Proudly Serving was built in the first place: not through some overnight viral explosion, but through repetition, pop-ups and Matthew’s almost granular fixation on the food.
Especially the fries.
The fries at Proudly Serving were never going to be an afterthought
Matthew is, in his own words, “a fry person.” That matters because one of his biggest frustrations with burger restaurants is how often fries seem to be treated as an obligatory-but-not-important side. That is, a side that exists because a burger needs something next to it rather than as something deserving the same attention as the main event.
“A lot of places truly think of fries as an afterthought,” he said. “And I’m like, dude, that is just as important as the burger.”
From Proudly Serving’s earliest days, Matthew was determined not to do that. During the pop-up era, that meant hand-cutting potatoes late into the night himself.
“I’m in my kitchen till like 2AM hand-cutting my fries and using this shitty fryer from Target,” he recalled, laughing. That was a fryer, mind you, that eventually made it into his Downtown Long Beach pop-ups, where he would become a staple at places the Hi-Lo liquor shop.
Happy accidents have helped form Proudly Serving
Eventually, a chef and former business partner suggested something that would save Matthew countless hours: Stop hand-cutting the fries. The suggestion initially ran against the romantic restaurant notion that “fresh” automatically means “better.” But a quality frozen fry offered something hand-cut potatoes struggled to provide at scale: consistency and a carefully engineered texture.
McIvor was introduced to Lamb Weston, a major potato producer with a seemingly endless catalog of fry styles. And then another accident happened: He ordered one fry. A different fry showed up. The delivered version was thick, coated in flour and battered—so much so that McIvor initially thought they would be a disaster when they hit the oil.
“As soon as we dropped them in the fryer, all the flour starts to get into the fryer,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh fuck, these are going to be a train wreck.’”
The plan was to burn through the shipment and switch to what he had originally ordered. Then customers started eating them. And they have, happily, never left.
The chili was created by someone who had never eaten a chili burger
If Proudly Serving’s fries were born partly through accident, its chili came from a particularly SoCal form of curiosity.
Much of Proudly Serving’s menu, McIvor said, is built as an homage to burger restaurants that came before him. The chili was his nod toward Original Tommy’s, one of Los Angeles’ defining burger institutions and a brand virtually synonymous with the city’s particular style of chili burger.
There was just one problem: Matthew had never actually eaten there.
“The funny thing is I’ve never been to Tommy’s ever,” he said. “I’ve never even had a chili burger prior to making our own. I never had a chili burger in my life.”
Growing up in New Jersey, he naturally understood chili to include beans. Then, during the recipe-development process, his Texas-born neighbor happened to walk by. Matthew asked him the essential albeit ballsy question: Do Texans put beans in chili? The answer was an emphatic no.
Proudly Serving’s chili is so important to Matthew McIvor, he has decided it has to be cooked in a singular place with oversight.
From there, Matthew began researching and experimenting, eventually building Proudly Serving’s version around a beanless base with chile de árbol and New Mexico chile powder providing a creeping heat, with Maseca helping bind the mixture. The result has become one of Proudly Serving’s signatures—and certainly the city’s best chili burger: rich, meaty, spicy and assertive enough that Matthew has had to remind staff to warn customers who might not expect its heat.
It has also become something he guards obsessively.
As Proudly Serving expanded, Matthew discovered one of the most frustrating realities of scaling a restaurant. A written recipe does not necessarily mean every kitchen will make it identically. Different locations could produce subtly—or not so subtly—different batches. McIvor recalled tasting an early batch in Long Beach after customers mentioned something seemed off and immediately realized it was not up to his standard.
That frustration has pushed Proudly Serving toward centralizing more production, with batches made from a single commissary operation and distributed to its locations. Consistency, after all, is part of the craft.
Just look at their Long Beach Food Scene Week special: a tuna melt that rivals the best the city has.
Proudly Serving might be serving humble food, but it comes with a wonderful in-tuneness that showcases culinary care in creating it all. Their Long Beach Food Scene special, a modest tuna melt, reflects that.
“We at first thought to buy high-quality canned tuna, but then I said, ‘No,'” said Executive Chef Everton Trefilio, who said they should sous-vide a fresh tuna—something his previous workspace, Barsha in Hermosa Beach, used to do with their Tunisian-style fish.
This one is California-ed out. Capers. Parsley. Cayenne. Lemon. It’s bright, perfectly salty, and between two thick white bread slices and plenty of American cheese, it is hard to put down.
Proudly Serving’s burger is smashed, yes—but not a chip-like crisp. It’s still a burger.
Matthew, however, had and still has little interest in pulverizing a patty into an enormous, lace-thin beef cracker simply to maximize crispness.
“There’s a lot of smashburger places that do that whole smash-it-to-oblivion thing and it’s like a cracker,” he said. “That’s just not me. I just don’t get it. I want some chew to my burger.”
In other words: He still wants the thing to eat like beef. That philosophy extends to nearly every component surrounding it.
“I take a lot of thought into every single menu item that goes on that menu,” Matthew said. “I don’t just go to the store and find the very first pickle or the very first slice of cheese and just say, ‘Yep, that sounds good. Let’s go with it.’”
In other words, it is good food, yes, but good food determined by care.
The real product at Proudly Serving hospitality
For all Matthew’s obsessing over beef, fries, pickles, onions and chili, ask him what makes him proudest and he does not point to any of them. He points to his staff.
“Hospitality is very, very important to me,” he said. “I want people to come in here and leave with a sense of family—or, you know, just a sense that it’s a different feeling going in there. It’s not just a place to grab a burger and bounce.”
That philosophy stretches back further than Proudly Serving.
Matthew grew up the youngest of three children, with siblings significantly older than him. His parents traveled often and brought him along, meaning much of his childhood was spent experiencing hotels, restaurants, and unfamiliar cities. What stuck with him was not necessarily the luxury of travel; it was how people treated him.
“I would go to hotels all the time and I would travel to all these different places,” he said. “It just always stuck with me how the concierge would treat me and show me things.”
The burger might be humble but it’s a cultural powerhouse; Proudly Serving’s approach needs to match that with service.
Those memories eventually became a blueprint.
“I just knew hospitality was something I always would probably find myself in,” he said. “Now that I’m in it, I just start thinking back to all those times of what people did to make me feel a certain way. And I just try to do that every single day.”
That is why a compliment about Proudly Serving’s staff means more to Matthew than any declaration that he makes the best burger in Los Angeles—or Long Beach.
“I get stopped all the time,” he said, “and people always commend me on the staff, and that makes me a thousand times more happy than if they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the greatest burger I ever had.’”
For a burger business operating in perhaps the most burger-saturated region in America, it is a surprisingly useful philosophy. Matthew does not need Proudly Serving to win some imaginary burger war.
“Me having, like, the quote-unquote ‘best burger in LA or Long Beach,’ I could fucking care less,” Matthew said. “I just do what I do as good as I can and hopefully people enjoy it.”
Proudly Serving is located at 6332 E. Pacific Coast Hwy.
