Our already-stellar burger game is about to be amped up even more, Long Beach. You might have heard of Proudly Serving, the South Bay smash burger phenomenon that is often featured on Best Burger lists. You might have even eaten them in Long Beach when they were just a pop-up inside Beachwood (before it closed to become ISM Brewing) in DTLB.
Either way, they’ve become a staple in the burgerscape of SoCal—and owner Matt McIvor, who has long been searching for a home in Long Beach, has finally found one. Taking over the former, short-lived Beasties space at Marina Pacifica, Matt says the process has been streamlined and they will be opening in mid-March.
“You know I’ve been searching for a Long Beach brick-and-mortar for years,” Matt said. “When this opportunity came up, I just felt it was an offer I couldn’t pass up.”
What to expect from the Long Beach location of Proudly Serving…
The food? It is, indeed, great. For Long Beach, they will be getting a first: a fried chicken sandwich on the permanent menu. Even more…
Their chili cheese fries? Simply stellar—and that includes the fries alone, crisped in duck fat. But for the meat eaters? Even better when slathered in Proudly Serving’s solid, spicy chili, American cheese, and onions—an ode to Tommy’s famed (and infamous for many a bowels across SoCal) chili cheese fries where there are no beans, no fancy schmancy cheese, and thick-cut fries.
Also, some damn good burgers, which come in a variety of five. The PS Burger, the spot’s OG hamburger, is a pseudo-ode to In-n-Out Double Double, where the Thousand Island is deconstructed—with dill pickle, not bread’n’butter—and the patties and cheese come in twos.
There’s The Founder, a direct nod to the biopic about the founder of McDonald’s, and a burger that one wishes was found at Mickey D’s. A chili cheese burger. A pastrami burger. And the Juicy James, a bacon cheeseburger beloved by its patrons.
The story behind Proudly Serving
Proudly Serving has a story that it can be, well, very proud of given the work Matt put into the concept.
“We didn’t just magically arrive at all this,” Matt told me when he opened his first brick-and-mortar in Hermosa. “This took quite the practice—as in my first PS burger had 13 previous iterations before we arrived on the one he served.”
Those previous iterations were the result of a popup in his neighborhood—a popup that also didn’t magically arrive: Matt had had a food PR business for the decade before the pandemic, becoming the manager for countless restaurants, chefs, breweries, wineries, and production spaces. With that massive, almost endless number of accounts comes a truly endless exhaustion: Egos, combined with the need to be perpetually efficient for clients (who often dismissed or outright refused to acknowledge that other clients existed), meant one thing—and that was a desire to escape.
So he decided to open a restaurant—with Alex Carrasco of Bee Taqueria—and then all hell broke loose with the pandemic. Without paying themselves, like many new restaurant owners, McIvor returned to his former business. And he was not only faced with returning to business he wanted to escape, but he was also outright forced out of it as restaurant after restaurant began to cut every single expense it could, including PR.
Persistance and pride define Proudly Serving
“I kinda knew it was gonna happen—it was just a reality if COVID prolonged, and it did,” Matt said. “So, here I was, with a wife and a one-year-old, going through our savings… And I loved burgers. And it’s an easy thing to sell out of my driveway.”
Hitting up the seemingly endless interest sparked by humans stuck in their apartments and bored and mindlessly perusing everything from Facebook groups to Nextdoor, Matt told his story and said he needed to make money making burgers. And slowly but surely, people started showing up. By the fourth popup? Over 150 people down the street, eventually being dubbed “Burger Alley,” where folks would bring chairs and their own beers to kick back.
Now, Proudly Serving is opening its third location, right here in Long Beach. Time to get your burger on.
Proudly Serving will be located at 6332 E. Pacific Coast Hwy. It is expected to be open by mid-March.
