The Rotary, Old Street: filth, glorious filth

Probably the best chicken burger I've ever had.

So after my experience at Mahiki's Rock Lobsta (sic), where if I hadn't paid half price I might have gone postal at the sight of the bill, I wasn't that keen to go to another Carl Clarke restaurant. Along with the roller disco restaurant (which surely is just asking for a dreadful stitch) I decided in my head he was all style over substance.

But my burger-loving colle
ague came across the Rotary, just south of Old Street roundabout, and was adamant we had to go. He watched my heart sink as I thought about another overpriced attempt to doing something straight laced in a "punk" way. I can assure you, the only punk in the world with enough money to eat at Rock Lobsta is Iggy Pop, or John Lydon since that gut-wrenching butter advert.

I've gone past the Rotary many a time, glancing into its spacious, seemingly soulless interior, then heading straight past it to Yum Bun. It seems I've been making a mistake.

Not every time mark you. If you ate what I ate at Rotary every day, not only would your afternoons in the office become more sleep ridden than an unemployed narcoleptic's, but you'd also be larger than Lisa Riley in about a week. Their food is pure filth. Pure, gorgeous filth.

Burger me

I had the chicken burger, the healthy cop out. But at £12 I was expecting something pretty special, and this one was no compromise. Deep fried in what felt like an inch of batter, coated in spoonfuls of tangy, moreish burger sauce and topped with crunchy shredded veg it was almost more than a man should, or even could, stand. At first bite there was nothing clever, but on second look it was genius. How the bun didn't turn to mush I don't know, how the batter was crispy even in the sauce is a mystery, and how I managed to eat it is a question I'm still asking myself. Sometimes I have Vietnam-style flashbacks as I sweated and strained my way through it, but I never wanted to stop.

The chips were the perfect mix of trash and genius too. Looking and initially tasting like the perfect McDonald's chips – the ones in your head before you get the box of droopy starchy twigs – they were so much more satisfying, with their meaty flavours from the beef dripping. Not a place for vegetarians then. 

And that's the only issue with the Rotary. Just like at Clarke's Rock Lobsta (sic) I have no idea who would eat there. We went on a Thursday lunchtime, when office workers try to convince themselves the weekend is almost upon them, and it was pretty much dead. It was,
in all truthfulness, far, far too much for lunch. I felt like a bag of sand for about 24 hours. So it's an evening thing, but I rather think most people run from Old Street as soon as 5.30 hits. It's not really somewhere you want to stick around in unless you're headed to Fifteen, the Nightjar or the Old Fountain. I admire Clarke's ballsy approach for putting restaurants where they don't belong (Silicon roundabout, a roller disco and a crap nightclub) but whether it makes business sense I don't know.

Still, I'll be back. But I might skip breakfast beforehand.

   

Five Guys Covent Garden: fast food failure

Not fast. Not cheap. Not that tasty.

BREAKING NEWS: blogger eats burger at trendy new joint.

Forgive the sarcasm, but sometimes my own hobby bores me. But I had to go didn't I? A London food blog without a Five Guys review would be like a burger with no pattie.

God knows why though. Because Five Guys fails at EVERYTHING it attempts to be. Like many of my compatriots, my overwhelming feeling after leaving Five Guys was that I had just been on the receiving end of a lot of broken promises. Not all of those promises were made by Five Guys - many by its fans who had visited it in the US - and some were more hurtful than others. But a promise is a promise.

For a start, there are a lot more than five guys working for them. There were hundreds of minions, all dressed like they were on their way to a baseball game. Five bouncers at the door, five at the registers, five at the chip fryer, five building the burgers and five actually frying them. Then there were five cleaning up and five doing precious little but watching the queue. I make that Thirty-Five Guys.

It feels a lot like a McDonald's - but red is the colour. There's the crappy plastic diner feel, the queues at the registers and terrible, terrible uniforms. In fact, it would sit quite comfortably next to an Aberdeen Angus Steak House.

Like most tourist traps it tries to hide behind smiley staff, promises of provenance and fun text on the walls (the best one being "hand shaped burgers" - I really wish they were hand shaped rather than round). I'd say they have misunderstood the kind of people London burger lovers are, but that's not actually their market. Theirs is tourists, Americophiles and, apparently, people who wear K-Swiss and T-shirts with Rihanna on. The bloggers and burger lovers have hated the place.

The experience is pretty stressful. You queue once to order, and then sort of hover around waiting for the food in the middle of the atrium. As always happens when Brits are forced to loiter, a queue forms. So every now and then an employee has to come and break up the queue as it threatens to go out the door. It's a bonkers system.

The burger

The burger itself wasn't a disappointment - but more because my expectations were pretty low. To be fair, it probably slightly exceeded them. In the flesh they are not half as ugly as most blog pictures imply. It didn't look like it had been run over or delivered to you in an air drop. The meat was nicely cooked - the committee of cooks crowded around the grills evidently voted to take it off the heat at the right time. And the bread and toppings were good and fresh.

But to say all that is skirting around the issue. It didn't really taste of anything. The meat was almost fat-less and therefore flavourless. And it wasn't so much underseasoned as not seasoned at all. The two patties were generous enough, but both were thinner than the huge wedges of gherkin, which were so big that the predominant texture of the burger was crunchy. Burgers shouldn't be crunchy. They should be sloppy, juicy and almost impossible to eat.

With the burger you can get spicy or salty chips. By which they mean spicy chips or just chips. I went for just chips. I'd watched the bagger fill my pot with chips, then pour another scoop of chips straight into the bag. That's a lovely touch, because the best bit of going to McDonald's is fishing out those bonus fries from the bag at the end. Sadly I couldn't eat them all. They desperately needed an extra few minutes in the fryer. Some were soft and limp, which is really unpleasant for skin-on fries.

But the worst bit is the price. At £10.75 for burger and chips it's not cheap. A friend of mine said we shouldn't compare it to our more gourmet burgers because it's fast food. But it invites the comparison by pricing itself wrong. Fast food should be quick, cheap and tasty. Five Guys fails on all counts. It's £1 more than MEATliquor, £2.75 more than Dirty Burger and a whopping £3.25 more than Honest Burger. All of which do considerably better food in better places. The latter of those two do it faster too.

People will pay the price for a bit of Americana. Hell, I paid the price for a bit of Americana. But all I kept thinking while eating it was this could really do with a bit of Big Mac burger sauce. And that's not a good sign is it?


   

Honest Burger (Camden): Truly super

One of the best British-style burgers – honest

Just when you think the dude-food-burger craze can't get more crazed, something reminds you that people's appetite for it is insatiable. Last month it was the opening of the universally panned Five Guys and Shake Shack. Then it was the burger top trump cards and cufflinks (!). Now, apparently, people are doing burger crawls all the way from Five guys, through Byron, MEATliquor, Patty & Bun, Hache and on to the latest fashionable burger bar to make a bid for global domination – Honest.

Tucked away in the stables of Camden, the third Honest Burger is small, open and slightly weird. Separated from the street by a wooden fence you feel like you're eating in a pig sty. I find it suitable, although quite how you could pig out an Honest Burger after five other cardiac arrests in a bun is beyond me, especially since Honest's portions are by far the most generous of all of them. They were also, with the exception of Dirty Burger, by far the cheapest. £8 will get you the feast you see before you.

There are a couple of other things that set Honest aside from its many, many competitors. The burger itself is decent and flavourful, the bun passable, but it's everything else that matters. They use British cheeses to top the burgers, something I am all for. You have to be in the right mood for American cheese, which is more a pungency in the noise and a oil slick on the roof of your mouth than a flavour. At Honest you can get a mature Cheddar, Red Leicester or, joy oh joy, a Stilton. All of which would have worked a treat with their lovely red onion relish.

The chips were excellent too – the opposite of Bukowski's perfectly formed crunchy monsters, Honest's  rosemary salted chips are gnarly, deformed and utterly ridonkulous. They look like hand-chopped actually meant they had Jackie Chan in the kitchen, screaming as he karate chopped his way through tons of spuds for minimum wage. And goddamn it they were delicious. Again, I was let down by the presence of Heinz and Hellman's – both great sauces, but I always want more invention in these places. Once you nail a burger, you need to keep improving things.

I can't complain about the beer list though – Redchurch dominates and the Bethnal Pale a great choice, but we also really enjoyed the Big Wave – a Hawaiian golden ale we ordered out of sheer curiosity. The friendly waiter didn't even blink as we ordered 5 drinks for four people. He evidently knows his list is good. I liked him a lot until he persuaded us to play a game of credit card roulette, where you all put your card in the bill fold and the person whose card is drawn pays…

... but I maintain the food was worth the £60 I had to cough up. Honest Burger do great burgers, better toppings and even better chips, with a good beer list. Where else would you go when caught out drunk and hungry in Camden? I can;t think of a better idea. Honest.

Just make sure you're really hungry, and if you're burger-bar crawling have 999 already dialled out on your phone – Camden Lock might be a bridge too far.

MEATmission: Holy Hell

Same burger, but you've gone to a better place.

If there's one thing sure to give you a 4pm energy crash at the office it's drinking a pint of 5% Sierra Nevada and demolishing a chilli-topped burger with chips at 1pm on a Friday while sitting in a darkened church. And with God as my witness I swear I would do it again.

MEATmission, the sister of MEATliquor, opened in a former mission near Hoxton Square at the start of the year. Quite how the poor souls who founded the place, and who's names adorn plaques on the walls, would feel about this transformation is now irrelevant. In this modern age it will have more evangelists through its doors as a burger bar.

And quite right too. It's a brilliant setting. Not only does it have a much less daunting atmosphere than MEATliquor, it somehow feels like it's trying less hard too, even though it must have taken a lot of effort to turn the the plaqued, pillared and stained glassed hall into a dining room. This is despite the fact it offers a much wider menu, including (God forbid) non-burger related products. I didn't give them a second look. I'm here for one reason, and it's just as likely to be religious enlightenment as it is chicken wings. So I chose the chilli burger and waited patiently. Unfortunately, despite there being tables a plenty, we had already been forced to stand and wait to be seated, simply because no waiter would acknowledge our presence. It felt suspiciously as if we were queuing. Now WHERE HAVE I DONE THAT BEFORE?

So my patience was already pretty thin, and my table of colleagues had gone silent, occasionally voicing how hungry they were, as if doing so could change a thing. The food took a good 30 minutes to arrive. Now, at a burger joint that's just not right. I want to eat and be out the door in that time, not have to have an awkward chat about whether we should even tip as the hour mark ticks by.

Still, once the burgers did come they were really excellent. Perhaps ever so slightly overcooked, they were in my case made special by the ladleful of sloppy chilli con carne on top, which wasn't just a damned good chilli in its own right, it did an admirable job of staying in the bun while I mauled it. The chips, meanwhile, played the role of Garfunkel (rather than Paul Simon) and didn't really add much, and I'm still disappointed by the branded condiments. My friend's chilli fries, however, looked fantastic. They were almost onomatopoeic in the way that they looked exactly how I would draw a heart attack. It would be a great way to go though.

Being in a mission, it would also be a great place to die. Perhaps God would think you were there for more ecumenical reasons. And I have to say, if there was to be one true religion, the people behind MEATliquor make a strong case for being our elected saviours.

   

Dirty Burger: worth its salt

Trashy as hell. Tasty as heaven.

I haven't taken a picture of the outside of Dirty Burger. It has to be seen to be believed, and it's very important that you don't quite believe in Dirty Burger. The reality is less satisfying. It's an ideal; a dream; a craving. 

It's also a shack, attached to the back of Pizza East in Kentish Town. It forms one corner of the kind of car park you don't expect to see outside of a Swindon industrial park. It's artfully designed to look like a cabin in the woods, and does so very well until you walk in and everyone's got thick-rimmed glasses and their polo shirt buttons done up so tight they are struggling to swallow their burgers.

But they have to swallow, because Dirty Burger burgers are so salty - so lip-wrinklingly salty - that you're addicted after one mouthful.

Given that they appear to have been assembled and then dunked in the Dead Sea, they are still damned fine burgers. The patties aren't a patch on meatLIQUOR, and nor is the sauce, but they don't insist on using American cheese which is a relief. Instead you get sticky, stringy, non-luminous cheese that sticks gleefully to the paper the burgers come wrapped in. You also get a slightly damp bap, which should be a let down, but it actually it helps the defiantly dirty textures as it all combines into one filthy, glorious cocktail in your mouth.

By contrast, the chips were crispy. So crispy. It was brilliant - almost like eating crisps - except for the bizarre lack of salt. It was as if the chef had lined the burger and chips up, seasoned the pattie, wondered off, come back and forgotten which one he'd seasoned. Still, those crinkle-cut fries were excellent, as were the unforgettable onion fries - essentially onion rings fried to within an inch of their lives in oil so thick even Michael Phelps would drown.

So I wasn't completely sold on the food, and my vanilla milkshake was a little sweet too - I say this knowing it's as banal as going a Mika gig and saying it was a bit camp. Somehow I still loved it all, like someone clinging on to a relationship despite all the bad parts: I LOVED that the food took 10 minutes to arrive despite being a fast food chain; I ADORED the fact that there were no seats and we had to sit on the fire escape stairs outside; I MISS the way it fell apart in my hands. The dream was nothing like I thought it would be, but it was still a dream.

Like the best rock stars, Dirty Burger is brilliant and flawed, cheap and nasty, and a slight disappointment when you meet it in person.


   

You can also read my review of Pizza East, which Dirty Burger is attached to the back of, here

Red Dog Saloon: wouldn't be flying without wings

Disappointing but worth it for the wings.

Red Dog Saloon has terrible reviews. Even easier-to-please-than-a-retriever Time Out only offered it two stars. But they must be doing something right, because it's constantly spilling out onto the streets, despite the Byron that opened opposite late last year, and I was determined to find out what.

Jay Rayner had a nightmare there - involving raw chicken wings and reheated ribs - but the thing that really angered him was that the owners have never even been to America. It's shocking of course, but I'm not sure that matters in the end. None of its customers have either. Being on Hoxton Square, on a Wednesday night it's packed with suits from Old Street who fancied an "adventure" and who ignore the American beer list and instead down Amstel and worry about their ties.

Nothing about the place feels authentic, even the cliche bulls' skulls on the wall, and sat outside at their Homebase garden tables, you could be in any Hoxton bar. In fact, the fact that the owners have never been to America keeps the message of the restaurant clear and concise. This is what Britain thinks BBQ food is.

So far, so bad. But things improved. There website looks spot on, the menu extensive and appetising. In true Man-versus-Food fashion they even have a spicy wings and an all-you-can-eat burger challenge. I always worry about these places, because its often a sign that they are burying poor ingredients by loading as many as they can into each mouthful. Remember that later.

We ordered a basket of their award-winning buffalo wings, which were genuinely excellent. Crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside, so spicy that breathing near them caused fits of coughing, and served with a beautifully rich blue cheese sauce. It was mess at its best, and even two lemon wet wipes couldn't quite clean me up afterwards.

I wish I'd ordered more than eight, because that was peak. For the main I plumped for the burger, simply because I wanted to see how they would compare to their neighbours Byron. The answer is not very well at all. My Bar-B-Q burger, aside from confusing the two recognised spellings of barbecue, was just a slur of mistakes in a slightly soggy bun. The pattie was dry, the onion rings raw and moist, the cheese virtually tasteless and the sauce slightly caked - like the spillages around the lid of a jar. As a whole it was satisfyingly trashy, but more in a 2am McDonald's way than a camp confession that the burger's next stop would be my thighs and I didn't two hoots.

In a neighbouring basket the chips were delightfully crispy, but so oily that by the time we were scrabbling around the bottom of the basket, the paper they came in (bizarrely branded "letsdough") was completely see-through. My arteries constricted as I looked through the paper and saw my friend's face in complete detail.

If I were to be brutal I'd say you could get a burger just as good at your local Wetherspoon. That would be stretching things a little and to be fair I should go back and try the smoker part of the menu. But, the wings aside, it has offered me no reason to do so. Here's my advice - if you're hungry in Hoxton, get some wings at Red Dog, then walk the 20 metres to Byron. You'll thank me.

   

Byron: carefully crafted

An example of how to do a chain restaurant. Truly excellent.

Another day another Byron Burger opens up. This time on the trendy Charlotte Street, a road famous for tricking revellers into peoples houses, because the bars are so well disguised.

This blog should be renamed Fatman'sbaphands because all I seem to do it go to burger restaurants. Perhaps it's a sign I have restricted tastes, or maybe it just backs up my theory that the burger is the safety net of foods. It's borderline impossible not to enjoy a burger, however bad it is. That's why McDonald's rages on. A crap burger is still a burger.

Byron, however, do very good burgers. The buns were straight out of a burger van, but the meat is well seasoned and cooked rare and the vegetables are fresh. The Byron sauce was almost completely flavourless, but the crispy bacon gave all it had. Strangely, the gherkin was served on the side and was cut rather thickly, so when you added it to the burger it was like two railway sleepers poking out the sides. But all in all a glorious, sticky mess. But the onion rings were the stars of the meal. Crispy, oily, herby and gooey on the inside they were a real treat. You could taste the bad, feel the calories, revel in your slowly closing arteries and bloated stomach.

But even the onion rings couldn't hold my attention for long. Byron does a spectacular job of seeming personal and unique despite being an enormous, faceless chain. This Charlotte Street "offer" as they say in the business, is in a converted pub. During it's time as a boozer is musty have been quite a dingy dive. It's long and thin. It's windows hardly let any light in. You can imagine opening the door onto old men in flatclaps, who cover their eyes from the daylight, toothless mouths agape.

Now it's got white and black tiles, chrome around the bar, US-style booths and even, on the way to the loo, a walk way where you can look down on the diners. For some reason that pleases me, to see the balding patches of tubby men from an angle they never expected to have exposed.

But for all this there is one thing that makes Byron a GOOD chain, rather than just a chain. And that is the beer list - full of US and UK craft beers. Amercian IPAs, Hells lagers and porters. Whether they are matched to the food is hard to tell, but they all have high ABVs and more than coped with the strong flavours and textures of the meat. It's an exceptional touch, proof that a little thought can put you miles ahead of any competition.

It is, of course, being ahead of the competition that can send you spiralling off into faceless chain mode. But for now, Byron deserves it's success and it's crown as the best burger chain.

MeatLIQUOR: bap to basics

Stupid place, incredible burgers. I think.

The reputation that precedes Meat Liquor strongest is its queues. Miles in length the critics howled, longer than Disneyland they decreed, not worth the wait they posited.

Well we arrived on a windy, hailing, shitty excuse for an evening to find the evidence of queuing (a put-out bouncer, the obligatory concrete corner, Chinese whispers about waiting time and a pointless rope) but not much of a queue. And if I hadn't arrived 10 minutes late after approaching the restaurant from Old Street but via Notting Hill Gate (don't ask), I was assured by my companion that I would not have waited at all.

The reason behind this potentially flawed reputation is that MeatLIQUOR is trendy. It has managed the enviable trick of having the respect of East London, without actually having to be there. Decor-wise it is sat beneath a concrete block and things get even dingier inside, landing somewhere between an abbatoir and a pub toilet.

Closer inspection leads us to assume it is an attempt at a macabre US diner, arguably something we should have seen coming. After a short wait we were led through some plastic, red-paint stained curtains to a seat where the waiters would never, ever find us. So we immediately ordered their "house grog" (which they claim is so strong they only let you have two) and settled in for the long haul.

Just 10 minutes in we were both drunk and tucking into our "Dead Hippie Burgers", which essentially had all the ingredients of a Big Mac, but none of it was so limp you could eat it with a straw. However, it was so hard to eat a straw may have helped. The sauce fell out the sides, the meat fell apart and the gherkins clung to the side of your mouth like they were afraid of the dark. This is not date food. It's a dirty, dirty dinner. Hence the healthy supply of Plenty on each table. The burger was good, damned good. A little under seasoned, but also a little under-priced, which was refreshing for somewhere trendy.


Feeling cocky we also ordered a side of onion rings, which were the size of slinkies and delicious. Sadly however, half the chips were limp and went cold too quickly. I was also slightly disappointed by the presence of Mr Heinz and Mr Hellman on the table. Surely somewhere as focused on flavour and simplicity would choose to make their own sauces, or find a small artisan supplier.

The burgers don't match up to those of Hache, and only marginally beat the Diner chain. But they are cheaper and are more decadent. The cocktails were also good and the atmosphere of the place just the right side of trendy. I don't know why booking has gone out of fashion, but the only way to review a place like a this is to say how long you'd queue. We waited 10 minutes and, on a less miserable evening, I'd have probably queued for around 20.

But then, I'm still drunk from the grog.

MEATliquor | 74 WELBECK STREET | LONDON | W1G 0BA
@MEATliquor | info@MEATliquor.com | 020 7224 423

   

A love letter to an anonymous lover (in China Town)

Lovers in a dangerous time.

Dear last night's lover,

It's funny to think that I can't even remember how we met, given that I think about you all the time. I can't even remember your name. Is that bad? Because you were there when I needed you most. Like a beacon in the dark, a street light on a country road, an open Chinese restaurant at 3am on a Saturday.

You were beautiful, your glowing face lit up mine.  And I knew instantly that inside you were beautiful too. I loved your perfume, your open door, the moody waiters... We had some laughs, some spills (sorry about the tablecloth) and some thrills. Your Szechuan Chicken was crispy, sweet and sour, your spring rolls not completely soggy, and your duck fat and juicy. The beer was bad, and the waiter brought it after our main course, but that may have been a clever move on your part.

Life with you was so easy: a dream, a blurred, nausea-fuelled trip. It's strange how you stumble into love, and waiters, when you least expect it. It's funny how, even with booze and soy sauce all over your insides, I still got a dry smile from you. Like you knew me, or my type. You understood me so well. You knew my carb and protein needs, that flowing tap water was a good idea and easy access to the loo vital.

I'm sorry our goodbye was so abrupt. I'm sorry I underpaid. You slammed the door in my face, but you had to. I didn't want to leave, and that counts for something.

But dear lover, my lady of the night. It was a case of right time, wrong person. It kills me to say it. Maybe I'll see you again. Maybe one day we'll walk past each other and smile. In the cold light of day our beauty will be gone, but that doesn't make the memories any less special.

Or blurred.

All my love,
The drunkest guy in that drunk group last night

Hache: I got no beef

At its heart, the burger is a trashy concept. When a group of friends decide to pop out for a cheap meal, they may rack their brains for an interesting idea, but somewhere in the depths is a voice that constantly whispers: ‘A burger. Go for a burger’.

So we swallowed our pride and hunks of reconstituted meat at McDonald's or, if we felt particularly daring, a Burger King.

But suddenly we didn’t have to, because some bright spark dressed up the burger in a floury artisan bun, put a real tomato in it and put the word gourmet in the title. A few years later, London’s best burger restaurant was born.

Hache is a small, dimly lit cove on Inverness Street, just within hearing distance of the teeming millions at Camden Market. Stepping inside at lunchtime is like putting ear plugs in, but the effect is quite to opposite in the evening. The small, lino-floored restaurant has a buzz that makes you forget the sometimes slapdash service.

The best thing on the menu has to be the Indian burger, which cleverly combines two comfort foods by adding spices to the beef, mango chutney instead of relish and a crispy (not to mention oily) onion bhaji on top. Impossible to eat with my hands and too delicious to waste time with a knife and fork, I ended up eating it in just six mouthfuls (surely a restaurant record) before sampling my companion's duck burger. Such a dish sounds ridiculous, not to mention strangely cruel (as if the cows deserved their sticky end), but ducks and bread go together right to the end. They also go well with the spring onions and hoi sin sauce Hache put on.

I have been three times now and am still to make a dent in the menu, which consists of no fewer than 15 beef burgers. If you are not a fan of beef I don’t know why you would go to a burger restaurant. However, Hache does not judge is patrons, and has graciously supplied variants from chicken and lamb burgers of several varieties, to avocado salads and falafel burgers.

In fact, the only place where choice is limited is the drinks menu, particularly in the beer section, which sticks to standards such as Becks and Corona. It may be a little over-fashionable at the moment, but the addition of some US craft beers or real pilsners would complement the heavy cuisine and myriad flavours much better, and be in keeping with the ’gourmet’ styling of the food. It would also be interesting to see more precise beer and food matching, such as having a Kingfisher to go with the Indian burger.

Despite this missed opportunity you’d be hard pressed to leave the restaurant not promising to yourself to go again, even if it can be a little pricey (the duck burger is around £12 without chips). But next time you hear that persistent whisper in your head, remember everyone is thinking the same thing – and go to Hache.

Hache
24 Inverness Street, London NW1 7HJ
020 7485 9100

http://www.hacheburgers.com