north hampshire – Burger Source

Very well executed pub burger

Burger source

Living in rural North Hampshire, there’s with three kids, a garden to maintain, family commitments and busy jobs… we don’t have a lot of energy left over for date night. So the brief Amanda and I agreed on for a rare night with BIL babysitting was ‘somewhere not too far away’.

Having lived in the area for 12 years, there’s not that many places we haven’t been, but… a forensic search of Google Maps and Tripadvisor well-reviewed local pubs led me to book us a table at the Old House at Home in Newnham, an independent pub that had 4.5* reviews and was sufficiently nearby to meet the brief.

The order

You’re always rolling the dice with a pub burger. They have such a variety of items on the menu, you know they’re not grinding the meat on site – therefore everything is cooked well done and there’s a chance you’re going to end up with a charred hockey puck rather than a burger. But… this place really reviews well so I thought I’d chance it. Here’s how it’s billed:

Homemade Beef Burger with tomato, lettuce, smoked cheddar, pickle, crispy pancetta served in a toasted brioche bun & chips

I was designated driver, so just lime & soda to drink… and I eventually, as you’ll see, fell victim to the sticky toffee pudding they had as an option for pudding.

Amanda had a fishcake and a crumble, which I’ll mention in passing as they’ll probably appear in soft focus in the background of my burger photos.

The meat of it

Well, lookee here.

I’m not really sure what to make of it at first. Few burgers that feel the need to come ‘open face’ do so for any purpose other than misdirection (e.g. look at this brilliantly melty cheese… hiding a terrible burger)… but once assembled, you’ll see the proportions of the stack are all pretty sweet:

You can see the crisp pancetta sticking out the bottom left. The burger has heft but isn’t ridiculous. The salad looks crisp. The pickles – I started there – are sweet, sour and bright – a good start.

Let’s go cross section betfore we get into the tasting.

This is strong. There’s a crust on the meat, but it’s not dry at all despite being cooked well done. You can see the coarse grind of the meat in the patty. There’s a good amount of salad protecting the bottom bun, which is holding up admirably to the mass of meat above it. The bun is substantial without being overwhelming. The only real warning sign is the absence of any relish or burger sauce… but let’s get into the first taste.

Crisp, well seasoned outer, gives way to juicy, meaty centre – no aged funk, just simple flavours, but no worse for it. The bun holds up, adding a light sweetness and softness and crunch all in one. The cheese adds a light smokeyness and a melty pull, even as a savoury crunch comes away with the pancetta. A little fat oozes out of the burger as the sweet, crisp lettuce and tomato contrasts the umami bomb of the meat and cheese. It doesn’t need burger sauce – the moisture of salad and meat, the natural sweet and savoury – complement beautifully.

It’s really well done. If I was nitpicking, I would maybe have buttered the brioche (more?) pre-toasting, and used a blowtorch to add some char to the cheese melt, and maybe crisp the pancetta a bit more gently – it was a little on the blackened side of crisp. But really – none of these things diminish the burger experience. It is solid, and re-orderable, which is not something I’d often say of a pub burger.

The chips were almost perfect – really high quality potatoes, crisp on the outside and fluffy in the middle, and hit the goldilocks zone of well-seasoned. I had ketchup and mayo on the side which maxed these out – really solid.

(Amanda’s fishcake was apparently good too, on a bed of green beans and generously topped (and bottomed, it seemed) with hollandaise. She declined the poached egg topper it was meant to have, and I learned something about my wife).

A quick word on pudding (after all, this website is not dessertsource) – sticky toffee pudding is my kryptonite. It’s really hard for me not to order it when it appears on a menu of somewhere nice. And, gloriously, they had a ‘small’ portion option (£4.90 instead of £7.50 and not of Kaiju proportions). It was perfect – soft, steamy sponge, a lake of caramel, chewy bits where the dates hadn’t completely dissolved into the sponge, hot and steamy – contrasting beautifully with the cold, smooth ice-cream. <Chef’s kiss>.

(Amanda had an apple and rhubarb crumble with ice cream. Also nice.)

Monkey finger rating

Bun – 4.5/5
Build – 4.5/5
Burger – 4.5/5
Taste – 4.5/5
Sides – 4.5/5

Value – 4/5 – £19 for burger and side, ish, £5 for pudding, plus drinks and service – it’s a minimum £30 a head place. Good, but toppy for this particular menu choice

Burger rating – 4.5/5 – one of the top non-burger specialist burgers you can get, I suspect

The deets

Newnham is about 10 minutes drive from Basingstoke, a few minutes from Hook. If you know, you know. Recommended. Find the pub here.

Well-cooked and assembled Wagyu beef burger for £15? In a pub? Yes please.

Burger Source

OK, it’s another pub burger. But when a pub boasts of Wagyu beef, and has it alongside a regular burger on the menu, I’m thinking this is worth a try. This is a pub that takes its burgers seriously.

In fact; it was incorrectly billed as Kobe Wagyu beef on the menu. For the uninitiated, Kobe beef is beef from a specific strain of ‘Wagyu’ cattle, raised in Hyogo prefecture in Japan. This is why it struck me as so incredibly unlikely that a pub – even a nice pub, like the Falcon, in a lovely village like Rotherwick in North Hampshire – would be selling it in burgers. It’s famed for its tenderness and marbled texture, and is not exported in vast quantities – in fact, there are only 3,000 Kobe cattle in Japan, according to Wikipedia’s (admittedly dated) version of events.

This would make the £14.95 price tag seem incredibly unlikely… and in fact, on correspondence with the manager, it transpires they have been slightly misled by a Wagyu beef supplier called ‘Kobe Cuisines’ so will be editing its menu accordingly. Still, Wagyu beef. Yum.

The order

We were celebrating my mother-in-law’s birthday and arriving late to lunch after an ice-rink expedition, so were all famished. Some bread tempered appetites, and a Jim Beam on the rocks furnished me with a drink (I’m still on this bourbon kick and the pub was lacking in alternatives, though it had a wide selection of Scotch).

The main meal was the burger alone; I was offered toppings (bacon, avocado, cheddar, blue cheese etc.; blue cheese and avocado were recommended), but went for the pure burger from a desire to actually taste this highly acclaimed meat. This seemed to impress the manager.

The meat of it

You can see from the picture that this was not an imposing burger; substantial but not enormous. The pickle was nice but eaten separately given it’s pointless positioning atop the stack; the bun was eggwashed but not a brioche as far as I could tell. It was slightly too big for the burger, and so held up to the burger’s heft… but only just. Perhaps due to wagyu beef’s lower fat melting point, the burger was not as juicy as an equivalent burger made from a different beef?

It was accompanied with a nicely savoury mayo, deliciously crisp and fresh, sweet tomato and salad, and bacon jam – which is hard to describe, but more sweet than savoury and lacking in any kind of crisp bacon texture. Nice, though, and a good counterpoint to the well-seasoned patty, which was beautifully crisp but slightly too well done for my liking; a medium-well rather than a medium verging on medium rare. I’d guess 5-6oz for the patty; well seasoned, coarsely ground and loosely packed. Definitely winning on more levels than it’s losing.

The taste. The taste confounded me. Beef that well-done shouldn’t have been this juicy; there was a slight gaminess to the flavour and tonnes of umami from the seasoning, despite no bacon or cheese actually in the stack. The mayonnaise was clearly a good accompaniment and the bun didn’t distract whatsoever. Cheese would have been unnecessary, and believe me that’s not something I say lightly. Because, y’know, I love cheese.

The fries, thin, hand-cut, skin-on fries, were very well cooked and seasoned to perfection. They went beautifully with the bacon jam, in fact, and the fresh side salad was wonderful, alongside a slightly less inspiring but mildly pleasant, light coleslaw.

In all, it was an inspiring experience. Despite the beef being Kobe-style rather than Kobe, it’s instantly made it to the top of my pub burger league table and will motivate me to head back to Rotherwick for future lunches in the not-too-distant-future.

Monkey finger rating

Bun – 4/5
Build – 4/5
Burger – 4/5
Taste – 4/5
Sides – 4.5/5
Value – 4.5/5 – Wagyulicious: an outstanding burger for £15.

Burger rating – 4.5/5 – Top of my pub burger league table. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The deets

There are two pubs on Rotherwick’s main street and they both serve a burger, so make sure you make it to the Falcon if you want to try this one. You can find it here: The Falcon, The Street, Rotherwick, Hook, Hampshire, RG27 9BL.

Tag: north hampshire

Old House at Home, Newnham, North Hampshire

The Falcon, Rotherwick