7/10 - Grand Union, 55 Charterhouse Street, Smithfield, City of London

Location: Down towards the more dilapidated end of Charterhouse Street, Grand Union's black facade stands out against the old brick of smithfield market. Situated at the end of a long line well known establishments (think Fabrik, SOS, Comptoir Gascon, Beduin), Grand Union is one of the most recent additions to the GU Group family (which now has 12 bars across London). The decor inside is...quirky. Over the course of my meal I developed a love/hate relationship with the pink-horned bull's head diagonally across from our table. Our visit was on a Tuesday lunchtime, and the place was relatively quiet.

Price:

£7.95 for the burger (I went for the Bacon and Cheese burger), fries were £2.65, and onion rings were £2.95. Other burgers on the menu were in the £6.95 - £8.95 range, there is also the carnivorous sounding Gigantor (a massive 14oz of meat, double bacon and double cheese!) which I'll be sampling at some point soon.

Presentation:

Good. The presentation at Grand Union is all about the burger. Sitting on its own in the centre of the plate, like a meaty leaning tower of pisa, the burger is as tall as my hi-ball glass, speared with an even longer burger spike. Each layer clearly defined as your eyes roll up the burger - bun, patty, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, relish, and bun.

Toppings:

Bacon and Cheese. The burger appears almost dipped in melted cheddar cheese, and topped with lashings of bacon, both are salty, oozing that intangible umami flavour. Two things slightly let the toppings down - the thick wedge of beef tomato that dominated the rest of the filling, and the 3.5 gallons of tomato salsa that was sloshed between the tomato and the bun.

Bread:

Ok. This is not a bun fail, but neither is it a bun win. My dining companion commented "how on earth do I eat this with my hands?", addressing the lid of the bun which topped the burger like a jaunty bowler hat. In order to wrap hands, let alone jaws, around this bad boy, some crushing was in order, and this is where the bun fell down - it was too crispy from being over toasted and so, when the *squash* came, a dramatic splitting of the bun occurred. The result: topping tsunami, especially where the dollop of tomato salsa squirted across my hand, the plate, and the table. In fairness to the bun, it did retain it's shape around the burger, post squash, but it was a cracked affair, riddled with dangerous salsa-filled cravasses.

Meat:

Very good. A single, 7oz ground beef patty was cooked rare, to order (hear that Goodman!). The beef was roughly ground, and clearly handmade - a big, chunky, crumbly patty with plenty of flavour. 

Plate Accessories:

None. Nada. Nothing at all. And that would be ok if the burgers didn't look so lonely on their big plates, all on their own, like gastro pub rejects. Chips and onion rings came in separate bowls and were uninspiring. French fries were overcooked and so small that you had to take a handful to fill the mouth, and each onion ring clearly had to meet a standard size and shape before being allowed to join it's companions, but they were tasty enough.

Overall rating: 7/10
There is a lot to love about this burger (and the quirky Grand Union experience), but with a couple of important elements to resolve, namely bun and and over zealous addition of tomato salsa, this could be a great burger, and not just a good burger.

9/10 - Goodman, 11 Old Jewry Street, City of London

Location: If ever there was a true city location for a restaurant, it would be hidden away like Goodman, on a street not unlike Jewry Street. The simple, bold brass lettering above the smoked glass doors being the only indication of the meat palace awaiting inside. Simple, bold wooden furniture and an army of waiting staff clothed in butcher's whites strike you immediately - we dined during a subdued Thursday lunchtime hubbub, and our position right next to Goodman's dry meat ageing room deserves an honorable mention!

Price:
£13 all in. (Burger, fries and any toppings of choice)

Presentation:

Quite good. The old 'stick through the bun and burger to keep it all together' classic worked well here, served on a large oval plate and including a separate bowl of chips. Now, I'm not sure whether it was just me, but my first reaction was - is that it? The size of the burger on the plate just seemed tiny, but rest assured that once I held it in my excited hands, it was beautifully heavy. Clearly it was a matter of perspective...

Toppings:

Seeing as Goodman have possibly the best policy in London of not charging extra for any toppings (a great selection of mushroom, cheddar, bacon, fried egg, or fried onions), I decided to go for the bacon and cheese (there's a bit of a history of that, see previous blog posts...). Both were fabulous, along with some romaine lettuce, pickles, red onion and some tomato.

Bread:
Awesome. I'll fully admit that when I saw it, my heart sank. Having had an awful experience with a brioche bun at Corney and Barrow, I saw the bun that came out and my heart sank. As avid readers of this blog will know, there is nothing that destroys a great burger experience like a bun fail, however this was nothing of the sort! This bun was a glazed, brioche style bun but without any of the sweet brioche style, and it wrapped around the burger magnificently. 

Meat:

Incredible. I don't know whether it was sitting next to the meat ageing room, but somehow the meat glowed in the bun (and not in a radioactive way). Annoyingly it was cooked medium (health and safety meant cooking it rare was totally out), but the burger was wonderfully moist. The patty was made up of thickly chopped, aged beef with great flavour. It melted in my mouth and dripped magically onto the plate. I found myself making a satisfied 'nomnomnom' sound as I was eating it, much to the amusement of my dining companions.

Plate Accessories:

Not a whole lot, but it didn't need much. The chips looked a little anemic, but were crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.

Overall rating: 9/10
This was a very good burger, and my first visit to Goodman was a very good one. Shame the burger couldn't be cooked how I like it, still the goodman burger is a serious kick-ass experience and one I'll be recommending!


Worth another honorable mention was the 2008 Lodge Hill Shiraz, a Jim Barry classic (of which I have six in my cellar), a great spicy, inky Shiraz that will age well for at least the next three years - at £7.50 a glass - in my opinion this is great value and worked really well with the burger.

9/10 - #meateasy, Above Goldsmith's Tavern, New Cross

Location: On the first floor of the well known, but currently being renovated Goldsmith's Tavern, up a grotty staircase resides one of the worst kept secrets in current popular burger culture, #meateasy. Consisting of a single room, it's small, with an eclectic assortment of tables and chairs scattered about, and the walls papered with pages from the illustrated novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but boy is it busy!

Price:

£7  (Bacon Cheese Burger) £3 (Onion Rings)

Presentation:

It's a burger, on a paper plate, and it looks good! Presented 'bun on' (and that bun is not coming off easily...trust me), with a bit of melted cheese running down the site, now I've had better presented burgers, but what impressed me was this was attempt two - the first time round the burger came to me, (was it Yianni himself?), rushed to my table, apologised for how it looked, and rushed it back to the kitchen to tidy it up!

Toppings:

Bacon and Cheese, as well as some relish, and a wonderfully crunchy, vineagery pickle. The cheese was fabulous, fully melted and had seeped into the meat, welding it to the bun. The bacon was somewhat disappointing, although in fairness I could taste it, as it was miniscule...it didn't detract, but niggled somewhat.

Bread:

What at first glance appeared to be a simple white bap, turns out to be a fabulously dense, doughy bun that was more than up for the job of holding the whole delicious burger package together. As I've mentioned before, a poorly thought out bun ruins an otherwise fabulous burger - and this is none of the former, and all of the latter!

Meat:

This, ladies and gentlemen, is without a doubt one of the tastiest beef patties I have ever eaten. The thick-minced beef had a great long-aged flavour to it, juicy, medium/rare cooked with a unique spice to it. This is what my mind tells me burgers taste like, late at night after a skinful of beers, but it was neither late, nor was I drunk #meateasy, I take my hat off to you, for this is a total meat win!

Plate Accessories:

Nothing. Although we did load up on onion rings (very generous) and chilli cheese fries (phenomenal). In fact even the plate was paper, and the chilli cheese fries came with a plastic fork - we didn't care, the food was so good.

Overall rating: 9/10

To sum up the #meateasy burger experience is tough, it's like trying to explain what it was like being there when all the drummers from Live Earth came on stage and beat the SOS rythmn for the world - words don't adequately capture the experience. But when it comes to the burger...oh man, I didn't want to clean my teeth last night to hold that fabulous flavour in my mouth for just a few hours longer. If ever the Meat Wagon guys want to conquer the UK, all they need to do is upscale and show all these burger chains how it's done.

Boerwors - South Africa's 'secret' meat

When I say it's South Africa's 'secret' meat, what I mean is I'd never heard of it before Saturday night, when we headed over for a dinner party with some friends.

We'd been planning to do dinner for several weeks and, wanting to ensure that the wine matched with the dinner being cooked, I asked for a sneak preview of our main course. As our hosts originiate from South Africa, and they wanted to give us an authentic taste of their homeland, the answer to my question was they'd decided to make Boerwors.

Boerwors - eh?

Yup, I had never heard of it before either. In pronounciation, it sounded like Bierwurst, of german sausage fame, and as it turns out the concept behind it was fairly similar.

So what's in it?

I had to ask. How do you pair a wine with a sausage when you don't know what meat and spices are added - a simple pork sausage would go well with a zinfandel or something similarly medium-bodied, a hot and spanish-y sausage would go great with a Rioja. As it happens, boerwors is made up of beef and pork mince, mixed up with coriander, cloves, nutmeg, salt and pepper, the twist for this meal is it was to be turned into burgers, rather than wrapped in sausage casing, as was traditional. My obvious choice was a rosé, and I also decided to test a blended Shiraz/Cab Sauv./Merlot - which gave juicy notes, alongside a touch of oak and mint.

Boerwors is classically cooked on a South African Braai (BBQ).

How was it?

Obviously these had to be cooked medium, the pork not being a great rare meat, but despite slightly more cooking than I would like, they were actually pretty good! The nutmeg and cloves gave them nice depth, while the coriander added a touch of spice to the beef/pork mix. We topped them with mixed leaves, tomato, cucumber, grated mature cheddar and a homemade chutney, wrapped in fresh buns, which finished them nicely - I'm ashamed to say they were so good I had three...!

On the wine front, the rosé worked magnificently with the meat, but the blended red had to work quite hard, and it took about half a glass to settle down (I expect the wine needed a longer airing).

If I was making these at home, I'd experiment with some rosemary or some pureed apple in the meat mix as well...but overall, this was pretty good.

7/10 - The Ultimate Burger, New Oxford Street, London

Location: This aptly named restaurant is located on New Oxford Street, between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road tube stations. Optimistically named The Ultimate Burger, it's actually not a bad attempt at a burger joint 

Price:

£7.10

Presentation:
Presented with the generally ubiquitous wooden stick through the bun to hold it all together. I ordered the 'blue cheese' which incorporated a stilton-esque sauce, and portobello mushrooms on top of an alleged 'scottish beef' burger. Bun was a sour dough sesame seed job, and there was also some salad-y bits and relish included. Chips and onion rings ordered and came separately.

Toppings:
Pretty good. Blue cheese sauce was a little 'gloopy' but very mature and tasty, and the grilled portobello mushrooms have a wonderful, earthy flavour. The salad was fine, not limp and tasted fairly fresh.

Bread:

A quite nice sour dough bun, not as fresh as it could have been, but held the burger together well (actually quite hard to get my mouth around it!). 

Meat:
Pretty good, although the menu stated scottish beef but I wasn't so sure, the flavour was good, but it wasn't aberdeen angus. The meat was cooked slightly pink which meant it was moist and juicy.

Plate Accessories:
Nothing. Came on its own and chips and onion rings came in a separate bowl. Looked a little lonely, but it was a decent sized burger!

Overall rating: 7/10

A good burger, let down by the freshness of the bun and the spurious 'scottish' beef claims (I'm a marketer, and I want to see provenance!). The Ultimate Burger is a hard name to live up to and in my view it just doesn't have that wow factor, but otherwise a good, solid burger experience.

7/10 - Gourmet Burger Kitchen, St Pauls, City of London

Location: Ahh, ubiquitous GBK, how we love you. An absolute staple restaurant for burger lovers, the Gourment Burger Kitchen situated by St. Paul's Cathedral is the backdrop for a good burger. Visited this New Zealand outpost with Anthony, for an executive lunch and as usual it didn't disappoint.

Price:
£8.45

Presentation:
My Avocado Bacon burger was presented 'bun-on' with a stick through the burger to hold it all together. Served on its own with no plate accompaniments, my burger seemed a little lonely. However a separate plate followed with a bowl of chips and a bowl of onion rings (@ £3 a bowl), which made the table appear less empty.

Toppings:
Obviously putting aside that there was no bacon/cheese option, I plumped for the avacado bacon topping, which included some round lettuce, a slice of beef tomato, a couple of pieces of red onion, chopped (well creamed) avacado, a couple of rashers of smoked streaky bacon and WAY TOO MUCH tomato salsa. The combination was good, and

Bread:
Thumbs up! Although the bun looked a little generic, this was a soft yet firm sesame roll and was surprisingly hardy, allowing two-handed eating with no disintegration.

Meat:
A great aberdeen angus beef patty. Cooked medium-rare (as I'd ordered, and Anthony's was medium as ordered!) the beef was flavoursome and meaty.

Plate Accessories:
None. Although the bowl of chips, the chips were of a very poor, school canteen-like quality, but the onion rings were onion-y, crispy and really good.

Overall rating:
7/10


I haven't rated this down for not having bacon and cheese, however this didn't get top marks as the chips were £3 extra and terrible, and there was too much tomato salsa in the topping to work perfectly - however full marks for the quality of beef, and the choice of bun. A respectable 7/10 for GBK St Paul's.

Honourable mention: As I was lunching with a friend, it would be remiss of me not to mention that his BBQ Burger had a fabulous bbq sauce that was a cut above your usual. If bbq is your thing, this is the burger for you at GBK.

8.5/10 - SOS, Smithfields Market, City of London

Location: A city institution, Smith of Smithfields (SOS) is owned by celebrity chef John Torode. Located near Farringdon in Smithfield Market, this industrial-themed restaurant serves food over four floors, and includes a private dining room.

What the menu said:
‘Smiths’10oz Beef Burger, Mature Cheddar, Old Spot Bacon & Tomato Chutney

Price:
£13.50

Presentation:
Good. Beef, bacon and cheese all 'slapped' on in an artistic mess, demonstrating the homemade qualities of the burger.

Toppings:
Very good. Old Spot bacon very meaty and salty, but not crispy. Cheddar was mature, but I would say extra mature as it was a little strong for my tastes.

Bread:
Ok. A good seasame-seeded bun that was fresh and flavoursome, but it did crumble a little around the burger during the meal, so points lost slightly for that.

Meat:
Very good. A rare, handmade burger, lightly juicy, not too fatty and full of flavour. I wouldn't be surprised if the beef had been hung for 28 days.

Plate Accessories: 
Good. A decent portion of chunky chips in a separate tub with greaseproof paper, homemade mayo and sea salt.

Overall rating: 8.5/10

This was a great burger, only let down by the bread and the strength of the cheese. Recommend a visit to Smith of Smithfields, although the burger is on the pricey side at £13.50.

9.5/10 - Match Bar, Clerkenwell Road, City of London

Location: On Clerkenwell Road, Between Farringdon and St. John Street.


What the menu said:
Match Burger - Signature Burger, cooked to your style, served with fries, bacon and cheese.


Price:
£10.95

Presentation:
Good. Two halves of bun separated with burger, bacon and melted cheese on one side, the plain bun and chunky slice of beef tomato on the other half.

Toppings:
Excellent. Several meaty bacon slices with rinds off, clearly grilled as no residue grease or fat. The cheese was a light swiss variety that was lightly melted, but again not greasy. Single slice of chunky, flavoursome beef tomato.

Bread:
Great! Simple ciabatta bap, but freshly baked so still warm, avoiding the usual trap of the bun disintegrating in the hand.

Meat:
Very good. Cooked rare and clearly hign quality and low fat beef burger, homemade so not in a usual generic shape.

Plate Accessories: 
Good. A decent portion of hand-cut chunky chips served in a separate pot were light and crispy, served with homemade mayonnaise.

Overall rating: 9.5/10

This was the most amazing burger, combining all the essential elements, with a simple bun, tasty cheese and generous bacon, with a excellent quality beef. I would recommend this as a fabulous place to eat, however Match Clerkenwell has now shut down, although there is Match West End, the Clerkenwell restaurant will always have the edge (and fond memories) for me!

8/10 - The Distillers, Smithfield, City of London

Location: A small, but tastefully decorated pub on Long Acre by Smithfields Market called The Distillers.

What the menu said:
Distiller Beef Burger - Served Medium on Soda Bread Bap Bun, with Bacon, Cheese and hand cut chips

Price:
£9.95

Presentation:
Good. Two halves of the bun were separated with burger, bacon and melted cheese on one side, and lettuce on other half.

Toppings:
Very good. Single bacon slice was meaty and salty (hardly any rind/fat). Cheese was a very mature Red Leicester, melted over the bacon and burger, which added real depth the whole experience. Mixed red and green lettuce was chopped and crisp, allowing easy eating.

Bread:
Wonderful! The Soda Bread was heavy and salty, but added to the whole experience by wrapping itself around the burger and not disintegrating in the hands - one of the best bread solutions I've ever had.

Meat:
Very good. A medium-rare cooked burger, with a light 'bbq' style charring on the outside made this burger stand out.

Plate Accessories: 
Good. A decent portion of hand-cut chunky chips were simple and effective.

Overall rating: 8/10

This was a good overall burger, combining all the essential elements, with a great bun, tasty cheese and generous bacon, with a very good meat patty. I would recommend The Distillers Smithfield!