Burgers - the fight for a Happy Medium

A battle is being fought for London's burgers. If you have no interest in burgers, and I know for a fact there are at least a handful of you out there, you poor joyless things, you probably couldn't care less. But speaking as someone with a less than healthy (literally) obsession with the placing of minced beef in between two slices of bread, and for whom the search for London's Best Burger has been a bit of a personal quest over the last few years, I do care. And for once, the bad guys in this battle aren't international chains plying lowest-common-denominator ingredients, or even hugely ill-conceived "gourmet" offerings containing pineapple (ugh) or rocket (go away). No, this time the enemy is the Food Standards Agency and their team of almost comically bureaucratic Environmental Health Officers. People who have no interest in furthering Britain's reputation for food, no interest in making it any easier for struggling independent restaurants trying to do something right for a change and actually, let's face it, probably no interest in food at all. People, in fact, like Philip Harris.


I don't know what kind of person Philip Harris is. I have an image of him, stood alone in his vast, spotless kitchen using rubber gloves and a face mask to make his cheese and pickle sandwiches for work (I'm guessing he's also a vegetarian), but this might be unfair. He has a job to do, and my God he'll do it, even if it means coming up with heroically misguided rubbish like "This trend of the rare burger is becoming fashionable and is something we, as a profession, should be alert to." Alert to! Yes, Phillip, the rare burger is "becoming" fashionable (another glaringly obvious clue these people are as far removed from real life as it's possible to be - "becoming" fashionable in 2011? Really?). People are discovering juicy, tender pink beef burgers made from carefully aged meat and - horror of horrors! - actually enjoying them! Well, Philip Harris isn't going to take this kind of thing sitting down in his shrink-wrapped armchair. It's his job to sanitise, to dumb-down, to suck every bit of soul and joy out of the experience of eating out, and he has the infinitely unlikely possibility of an E. coli 0104 infection to help him along the way.


"The only way", says Harris, "such a product can be cooked to ensure the pathogens are destroyed is if the burger is totally cooked throughout, with no rare centre." And to be fair to him, that is the only way, just as the only way of ensuring you never get struck by lightning is to spend the rest of your life in a cave a thousand feet underground with a wet towel wrapped around your head. But I have it on good authority that with the combination of food safety standard in any half decent restaurant and the rigorous processes involved in the production of modern British beef, there is next to nothing at all to fear in eating pink burgers; certainly no more than there is in, say, eating raw oysters or fresh sashimi, which our friends from EH seem strangely to be far more relaxed about. There is a risk in eating anything, of doing anything, the sensible thing is to make people aware of those risks and then if they still want to have that chicken sashimi dinner (Harris would red-tape himself to an early grave if he ever visited Japan) then go ahead, why not.


You may think clueless pen-pushers from the FSA are too much of an easy target, and after all it is still possible to get wonderful juicy pink burgers from Goodman and Hawksmoor and the Meatwagon and Byron, and so, what's the problem if some obscure paranoid "directive" is drawn up by civil servants with OCD if it is only going to be heartily (and quite rightly) ignored? Ah, but you see, it isn't always being ignored. Take Barbecoa in the city, for example, who have decided that, on balance, the risk of being falsely (or otherwise) accused of food poisoning following serving someone a pink burger is not worth the damage to the Jamie Oliver brand, and have come up with a patty mix that supposedly holds its juiciness despite being cooked through to a rather unappetising monochrome. It tasted livery and strangely vegetal, like a sort of meatloaf sandwich, and was faintly unpleasant, but hey, I guess Jamie Oliver Co. is more interested in safeguarding against the reputation hit of Poisoned of East Sussex being splashed across the weekend tabloids than the damage done by serving an inferior product. And that's entirely up to them.


A couple of days earlier, and a press release from the Malmaison and Hotel du Vin group proudly announcing a "safe way of offering guests a cooking preference for their burgers which will keep the Food Standards Agency content, but without detracting from the great taste and dining experience." It seems the Mal too have been given the choice to either make a worse product, or be slapped with a prohibition notice, and being a large luxury chain with a nationwide reputation to uphold, they chose the former. Of course, I am only assuming the overcooked version of the Mal burger is worse than a juicy pink version because I have never tried either, but I think it's a fair assumption.

So, the battle continues. You may think that the right to enjoy a nice pink beef burger is sacred to every Londoner, but it is only thanks to a fearless group of restaurants actually willing to risk their businesses to produce the very best food they can that we are in such a fortunate position. From what I gather, it only takes one person to turn up at the door of the FSA claiming their dicky tummy is due to raw mince and yet another fine example is taken off the capital's menu. And if you don't care about beef burgers, think of a London without the Opera Tavern Iberico pork burger or even the pluma Iberica from José. Fantastic, exciting, unique dishes that the FSA would happily see banned. Enjoy while you can, then, the Great Burgers of London, spare a thought for the brave souls willing to stick their heads above the parapet in the name of good eating, and have a huge, heaving, cheese-soaked, juicy, bloody beef burger on me. Just don't tell Philip Harris.

Burgers pictured are, from the top, Byron's Uncle Sam, the Meatwagon Bacon Cheeseburger, Hawksmoor, Draft House, and Bar Boulud

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What is Michelin good for?

Being neither a journalist paid to provide timely comment on the day's news nor even a particularly motivated blogger at the best of times, I am never very on the ball when it comes to current affairs and this post is a few months too late. Ideally it would have been published on or around 18th January this year, when the 2011 Michelin Guide UK was released, and I could have added my name to the maelstrom of opinion that inevitably greets the yearly arrival of what, for better or for worse, is still the most important food guide in Europe.

In truth though, however I feel about the inclusions and glaring omissions in this year's Michelin, my opinion of the Guide has been on a fairly consistent downward trajectory since the multi-starred joints like Alain Ducasse and Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road stopped being quasi-fantastical Restaurants of Dreams and I moved to London and actually started eating in them. This is inevitable, of course - not only could anywhere not live up to the Godlike places I'd invented in my head, but a difference of opinion with any guide of any kind is only natural - such is taste and preference and the majestic variety of the human condition.

The problem is that, usually, guides are just that - guides. You can use review sites like London Eating or Square Meal, you can read blogs, scour the weekend papers, buy publications like Harden's or AA, but you will never (unless you are incredibly lucky) find any one source that is a completely infallible indication of a great evening out. There are just too many factors involved, too many variables for a short paragraph on a website or a score out of 5 to take account of. I think the best restaurant in London is Tayyabs but I can't guarantee that you will too. And most sensible people realise this and will not expect too much of anything that attempts to tell you where to have your dinner.

With Michelin, though, it's different. The star awards have become an objective shorthand for achievement. A restaurant, once given the nod, is "Michelin-starred" and can expect a great deal more custom, as well as, of course, the tacit authorisation to bump up its prices by 20%. The chef, too, is one moment an overworked, underpaid kitchen monkey, the next "Michelin Starred Chef", with a pay rise, a range of branded utensils and a senior sous to do all the work maintaining the starred reputation while he or she goes off on a book tour or guest spot at the Ideal Home Exhibition. So, a Michelin award is much more important to anyone in the industry than any other accolade. What, you may be thinking, is the problem here? Perhaps Michelin are just that much better at judging a place than anyone else?

I refer you back to this year's awards. With Michelin seemingly more powerful than they have ever been, and stars so disproportionally valuable in terms of prestige and their affect on the profit margins, there exists a kind of rarefied subset of places that exist purely to please Michelin. This is not news to anyone who has been following such things, but it's particularly sad to see, year after year, just so many dull star-friendly restaurants rewarded for doing pretty much exactly what they know they have to do, with their amuse-bouches, their pre-desserts and their petits fours. Anywhere specifically trying for Michelin stars knows, more or less, the kind of thing expected of them, and although I would never dismiss their achievement as being easy and admittedly you may accidentally create some rather tasty food along the way, I would argue that if your desired end result is to please a Michelin inspector and not a normal punter, this can only be a bad thing.

Take Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester. A more desperately boring, stiff, pompous and ponderous meal I've very rarely suffered, and yet it was just crushingly inevitable they were going to get the top award from Michelin. Who cares that the average diner would be far better served spending their money on a dozen and a half slap-up feasts at the Viet Grill or who knows how many steak and chips at Goodman; Michelin yet again found their own fetishistic preferences offered to them in a kind of culinary fellatio, and were only too happy to provide a happy ending.


I should probably insert a disclaimer at this point. Not only was I just as in thrall to the stars as anyone over the years, entranced in my hopelessly geeky way by the idea that you could measure culinary achievement so accurately, but also there are of course plenty of multi-starred restaurants I really like. The Fat Duck, the Ledbury, the Square; these are all superb places to spend your money and their attractiveness to the dreaded inspectors is no doubt a motivating factor. But I still can't help thinking that mainly they make food for themselves and their customers and the awards in the Guide are a (no doubt welcome) side effect of their innovation and effort, not the be-all and end-all.

Ultimately, Michelin is only, even at its best, a way for a certain handful of very expensive restaurants (and a certain type of stamp-collecting star-chasing gastro-bore) to measure their self-worth, but at its worst is stifling innovation in food, favouring overcomplicated French techniques over any other type of cuisine, and isn't even to the average person - and this is perhaps the most important point of all - a reliable guide on where to eat out any more. Discriminatory, elitist and completely counter-productive, in an ideal world the Red Guide would be just another voice in the crowd, a slightly pitiable elderly uncle still banging on about demi-glace and "Jerusalem artichoke cappuccino with hazelnut foam" while the rest of us just get on with our lives. We're sadly a long way from that situation becoming real, but hopefully, in London of all places, home to the #Meateasy, Keu!, Spuntino, Brawn, Bocca di Lupo, et al, we will find the self-confidence to pursue good food for good food's sake, and not grind all the joy out of eating by fretting about what Michelin might think. There is much, much more to life than a Michelin star.

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