Organised by Daniel Young of youngandfoodish, the London Burger Bash pits some of the finest burger chefs around in a contest to win the prestigious golden patty award. There have been four heats previously, featuring chefs from around the world, and now the winners of those events go head-to-head.
Here's the route everyone had to go through and who they had to beat to get here. As you can see, some serious names in the competition.
Here's the trophy they were competing for.
We had a reserved table, which cost a little extra, but saved so much effort compared to competing first-come first-served for bench space, especially given that there was a mob of us and the size of the event.
The venue itself worked well, it was outdoors but covered over. Luckily there wasn't significant rain anyway, just a few specks in the late afternoon. It would have been nice if the day was a tad sunnier, but it was mostly pleasant anyway. People came, queued, and enjoyed burgers by four great chefs.
The queues peaked mid-afternoon, but no matter now busy the groups were, everybody was enjoying themselves, bonding over a mutual love of meat.
How can you object to any event which has your table looking like this?
I also want you to keep in mind that the overall quality of the dishes was excellent, one person around our table rated the burgers from 9.4-9.9 out of ten, which shows you the narrow spread and high calibre offerings we were trying out, so when I talk about things which could be improved, this is in a context of differentiating between some fine meals by people at the top of their game, and not detracting from the dishes in any way - you have to be incredibly critical to find ways to narrow down your vote, and even then personal preference plays a huge part. Regardless of which ones I felt were better than others, if someone turned up and served me any of the four burgers, I would be happy to eat them.
Fred Smith, a man who has done an incredible amount to raise the profile of burgers in London, gave us his bacon cheeseburger - a simple description and a classic burger. Some people like to be adventurous with their flavours when trying new meals, others less so. While I am personally more in the former camp than the latter, I can definitely appreciate a good burger in any format.
Fred was clearly using high-quality ingredients. The meat was of a good standard, I was pleased with the gherkin, the cheese was his own special blend - based on, amongst other things, Parmesan and Red Leicester, giving an overall nutty flavour, and the whole thing is best described with the word "juicy" - this was not a meal to eat if you didn't want to risk spillage. Fortunately the bun held together pretty well despite exposure to free-flowing juices, although this was not the case for everyone around the table - a couple of us needed to flip their burgers as the bottom bun had suffered somewhat from the moisture.
The man knows what he's doing, and few would dispute that, as a classic cheeseburger goes, this was an exceptional entry, but for me, it was just a good bacon cheeseburger and needed a little something extra to give it that "wow" factor. Perhaps, had it not been up against some of the more ambitious flavour combinations I would have rated it higher. That said, if you stuck another one of those in front of me I'd have no problems eating more of it.
And as an added bonus, he gave us badges!
Joe Grossmann of Patty and Bun created the "Piggy Rascal" - consisting of Mangalitsa brioche bun, aged rib cap patty, Tallegio cheese, Mangalitsa belly bacon, confit pork shoulder, trotter & smoked pig dripping glaze, pickled cucumbers and smoked garlic mayo.
Joe was happily chatting away to the guests as he prepared our burgers, explaining how it was an uncommon, hairy Hungarian pig that he'd chosen to use, which was farmed in Cornwall.
Once again the burger was a moist offering, but this was entirely to be expected given the additions to the burger. This was a bold choice of flavours and it really paid off. Even a couple of people amongst our table who were uncertain on the idea of trotter got over their reservations and realised that there's a reason this team made it into the final.
Zan Kaufman of Bleeker Street made the "Bleeker Black" with beef, cheese and black pudding. A fairly simple base burger, but very well done, and I, for one, have seen surprisingly few offerings of burger with black pudding previously. Most of chose to hit this queue first as it seemed like an excellent brunch offering. The black pudding was soft and tasty - a far cry from what you'll commonly find. One of our group had his burger from them later and found his black pudding harder, possibly it was slightly overdone or he'd just been unlucky with the batch, but the rest of us had no such problems.
I would say the weakest part of this burger was the cheese - it was nice enough, but was lacking the impact of the rest of the burger and, when compared to the cheese on, say, Fred's burger, it drew the short straw. One element being merely very good instead of excellent does not a disappointing burger make, and this was nothing like a let-down. For most of us this was our opening burger and it set a remarkably high standard for the others to compete with.
Tom Reaney of the infamous Burger Bear pulled out all the stops with his "Grizzly G&T" made with aged beef patty, wild sloe berry gin bacon jam, smoked bacon, smoked yuzu ketchup, American cheese, disco bun. It was the sort of dish that, if you got the flavour-balance wrong, would be horrific, but if you got it right could be spectacular. I had every confidence in the Burger Bear's ability and I do not think this was misplaced.
While prepping and serving they were discoing away and clearly having a great time, and that's important at an event like this. His enthusiasm was infectious, and there's something to be said to listening to grown men sing "relight my burger" in the middle of a marketplace.
Yuzu seems to be a relatively new but increasing trend as an ingredient, and I'm fine with that.
The trouble with The Burger Bear is that his entry for the last burger bash was so spectacular that anything else just wouldn't live up to our expectations, so there were a few people around the table who felt that the last one was just that bit better. There was a sweet jam balancing against the rest of the dish, and I felt each element really complimented the whole. Plus, the bun was literally shiny. This burger fought hard and eventually won my vote, though it a close-run thing.
In addition to four fine burgers we were treated to two sides from the highest scoring runners-up at previous heats.
Almost Famous provided "Squeal Piggy Piggy Bacon Fries" - a dish that really needs no further description when it has a name like that, but here's the one we were given anyway - Little-crispy-crunchy-salty-smoky-creamy-spicy-covered-in-bacon-badness pieces of piggy heaven. Was the description accurate? I think I'll let the pics do a lot of the talking for me, I preferred the sweet potato of the two types of fries. A couple of our group found they'd been given a little too much sauce which served to overpower the bacon bits, but the balance on mine was about right, maybe leaning towards benefitting from a smidge more sauce if pushed, but not something you'd really see as a problem.
The fine folks at Roti Chai had come up with pulled chuck steak sliders with chili cumin rub, venturing from a side attraction to a full on distraction. Every time I have had food prepared by Roti Chai I have been impressed, and this was no exception. A couple of people at the event even put their votes towards the slider despite it not technically being in the running, and I can understand why. If this had been a full-size dish I would seriously have considered displacing my Burger Bear vote for it, and most likely would have done so, and I do not say that lightly.
One of the guys around the table wasn't big on his spices, so his mouth suffered a little from the rub, but it was so tasty he didn't care.
To go with their fabulous food offering Roti Chai were also selling cocktails, both of which were heavy on the booze, high on the flavour and, well, to be honest, who cares after that?
And, to round off the menu Marco Arrigo of Illy supplied the drinks in the form of a bicerin, the three-tiered Turinese classic of illy espresso, Domori hot cioccolato and fresh whipped cream. I'm not a coffee drinker and so I just had hot chocolate instead, but that was lovely too.
So, which burgers did we vote for? Our ten voters were spread across the contestants, and I'm happiest with that. I like that the contest was close, this is very important to me as, if there's a runaway winner then you haven't got the right entrants or someone's had a particularly good/bad day, if it's close then you know everyone's thrown in a good effort, they're all good chefs, and that the crowd has appreciated everything.
Once all the votes were in the winner was announced...
(Drumroll please)
By the narrowest of margins it was Bleeker Street, pipping Patty & Bun by a handful of votes. To show you how close it was I have a picture of the voting board, and that's before my sister put her vote in, increasing the Patty & Bun total a little further.
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