Cheeseburger and fries. Simple elegance.
The doors at HiHo Cheeseburger on Colorado Boulevard had barely been open when the line began to look less like “first-day curiosity” and more like a developing habit. Inside the new Playhouse District outpost, the mood was brisk and bright—counter-service energy with a dining room that still felt like it was introducing itself to the neighborhood.
Owner Matt Levin sat at a corner table, chatting happily, but with a wary eye on the daily operation. His goal is simple, he says,—a stranger takes a bite and their eyes widen. That happy reaction is the payoff.
HiHo Cheeseburger sits in the same restaurant “family” as sushi wonderland Sugarfish and handroll heaven KazuNori, Levin explained, but it isn’t a corporate clone operation. Each concept is run by separate teams. Levin runs HiHo with his partners, Sheeroy Desai and Jerry Greenberg. His own background, improbably, is not restaurants at all. He came up in entertainment, acting from childhood and producing, before a conversation about burgers evolved into a test-kitchen rabbit hole and, eventually, a new career.
The origin story begins with poker buddy and entrepreneur Greenberg, talking about his desire to find truly great grass-fed beef. Then came the invitation: “Hey Matt, try the test kitchen.” What began as “goofing around” became serious fast. Levin estimates they tested “a hundred different purveyors of meat,” plus buns, styles, and the small but consequential elements that separate a good burger from one people start texting about.
The beef, he said, is the anchor. HiHo’s grass-fed wagyu comes from First Light Farms in New Zealand—an intentionally limited supply that, in Levin’s telling, is also the reason HiHo won’t sprawl into a hundred locations. There simply isn’t enough of that specific beef to scale endlessly. Greenberg even traveled to see the farms firsthand, Levin said, and later showed the team photos, calling it “Disneyland.” Greenberg ultimately became an owner in First Light, he added—vertical integration with a burger-stained grin.
The burger itself is more roadside rather than steakhouse-thick, shaped by Levin’s affection for old-school stands and counter stools—think Lucky Boy, a younger Pasadena’s burger DNA, and the simple glory of a flat-top. HiHo’s style is smash-adjacent, but not smashed “to bits,” Levin said. The goal is sear and color, with enough juice left to remind you this is, in fact, beef.
Then there are the fries: real potatoes, cut in-house, with all the irregularity that implies. HiHo briefly served frozen fries when it opened in Ojai, Levin admitted, because making great fries turned out to be its own technical mountain. Frozen fries, he noted, can carry “12 to 13 ingredients” designed for consistency. HiHo’s, he said, use three: potatoes, salt, and the frying oil. When they’re right, they’re “pillowy inside” and crisp outside—the kind of fry that makes you reach for “just one more” and then quietly abandon the concept of “one.”
And the shakes? Another journey. HiHo started with a reputable organic cream mix, Levin said, but the ingredient list still bothered them. So they went all in, and now HiHo makes its own ice cream.
“We make the ice cream,” Levin said, emphasizing the lack of stabilizers and “crap,” the purity of chocolate tasting like chocolate and vanilla tasting like vanilla.
Levin’s most personal satisfaction is also the most “Pasadena.” He was born at Huntington Hospital, grew up here, went to Assumption and St. Francis, and now lives minutes from the Rose Bowl. This opening, he said, means friends he hasn’t seen in years wander in and recognize him—plus his daughter can ask for a burger a few times a week.
In a city that treats cheeseburgers as both history and sport, HiHo arrives with a confident idea: the “perfect” burger isn’t one wild ingredient trick. It’s the patient craft of eliminating shortcuts until the bite does what Levin keeps chasing—the quiet, immediate, unmistakable “wow.”
No reservations. No deliveries yet. Just get yourself here.
HiHo Cheeseburger is at 625 East Colorado Blvd Pasadena, CA.
