The Utah pastrami burger is a regional default, not a special order. In the Greek-run charbroil burger shops of the Salt Lake valley, pastrami on a cheeseburger is a standing menu fixture rather than an indulgence someone has to ask for, and that ordinariness is the defining fact. Elsewhere a pastrami burger is a stunt; in Utah it is the house grammar, a flame-grilled beef patty crowned with a fistful of hot griddled pastrami, cheese, and a tangy pink fry sauce on a soft bun, assembled the same way every time at a fast counter.
The craft is in the two cooking surfaces and the order they finish in. The patty is charbroiled over an open flame for a smoky, dry-edged crust, which is a different texture from the flat-top sear of a coastal smashed burger and is half of why the style reads as its own thing. The pastrami is worked separately on a flat griddle until it is hot, slack, and lightly crisped at the edges, then piled thick and laid against a melting slice of cheese so the cheese binds the cured meat to the patty as it sets. The fry sauce, a thinned mayonnaise-and-tomato dressing, is not a side condiment here; it is built into the bun as the sweet, tangy counter that keeps two layers of smoky charred and salty cured meat from collapsing into one heavy register. Shredded lettuce, tomato, and pickle supply the cold crunch. The bun is deliberately soft so it compresses to a tall, rich filling instead of fighting it. Built to the standard the style expects, it is a controlled excess: the cheese holding a stack that should slide apart and does not.
The variations are mostly size and the rest of the chain menu the burger sits inside. A double stacks two charbroiled patties under the same pastrami load; a plain cheeseburger build drops the pastrami and is the same sandwich without its signature; the shops' gyros and souvlaki run alongside it as the other half of the Greek-counter format. Each of those is a codified build with its own rules, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.