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.

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