The seemingly small matter of where one finds the best
burger in London inspires a disproportionately large amount of deliberation and
debate. From bona fide food critics to aspiring hacks like myself, everybody
has an opinion - the only thing we seem able to agree on is that if you have it
well done, yours doesn’t count. To date, Daniel ‘Young and Foodish’ Young has
put together what comes closest to being a definitive list of the capital’s
best bits of flattened beef, declaring the best burger in London to emanate
from the Goodman kitchens. This is a fairly accurate assertion in so far as it
is probably the best I tasted to date, despite a major balls-up with regards to
cooking time. I sampled their wares late-December at Burger & Lobster, a
Mayfair offshoot devised to satisfy public demand for the more humble end of
their menu (and presumably free up tables in their restaurants for people
spending vastly superior sums of money).
Even though either the person working the grill or the wait
staff seemed to have got something pretty badly wrong – medium-rare arrived completely
well-done – it was still a pretty awesome hunk of flesh and not at all dry, a
minor miracle given the way it had been cooked. Crucially, the fries were the
real deal – thin and overly salted in the disgracefully moreish, McDonald’s tradition,
while the lobster dish consumed by my companion was deemed pretty flawless. I
certainly deemed it an absolute steal for £20. Added to the fact that the
concept was beyond brilliant – a three-item menu, spectacular cocktails, the
simplest of price schemes – I was a very happy punter indeed, especially after
the management offered me free drinks to compensate for the unsatisfactory greyness
of my patty.
At the other end of the spectrum, many believe that life for
London’s burger aficionados began not in a well-heeled steakhouse, but in the
car park of a south-east London industrial estate with Yianni Papoutsis and his
Meatwagon. Again, there’s a certain amount of truth in this claim. For sure,
some of the best burgers I’ve tasted this side of the pond came courtesy of
Papoutsis and his #Meateasy tenure above a dilapidated pub in New Cross that
just happened to be dangerously close to my university. Yet by the time the
rest of my art school comrades caught on, the place hadn’t just become a
cesspit of pretentiousness, it had started to churn out inconsistent bordering
on average burgers, including one that was, for lack of a more eloquent phrase,
burnt to shit. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve
always been one of Papoutsis’ biggest fans and love the new joint, MEATliquor,
where the deep-fried pickles elicit a particularly strange type of nostalgia (I
used to eat them at the now deceased branch of Hooters in Boston). But that doesn’t mean to say that I’m blind to the occasional
failings of his restaurants.
