Tag: review

Big Fernand, Issy-les-Molyneaux, Paris

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A juicy Gallic smashburger (smashburgé?), worth travelling for.

Burger source

Ok, I’ll freely admit – I googled ‘burger restaurant’ near the hotel we were staying at for a business trip and Big Fernand jumped out. I liked the pictures so we headed down.

However, having Google translated the copy on the webpage for this review, I’m SO pleased we went as would TOTALLY travelled for this even if it hadn’t been convenient:

“In the middle of a small Parisian street, at the end of a restaurant of district embalmed with the smell of herbs and fresh bread. A band of mustachus is busy at the rhythm of the sizzling meat just chopped to revisit a dish known by all: the hamburger. Their Hamburgs caress the sweet dream of seducing the most refractory skeptics and offer a second romance to the lovers convinced of the burger. This is how Big Fernand was born: a mixture of popular culture of a dish that brings together people from all backgrounds and products gleaned throughout France.”

There’s only one right reaction to this: wow.

The burgers are cooked as ‘smash’ burgers -a healthy portion of the mince is rolled into a ball and squished down onto the grill with a heavy spatula, cooked in its own fat until crispy, scraped off the grill, flipped for a lesser version of the same treatment before being topped and stacked on the bun, then wrapped in grease-proof paper to serve. By coincidence, my favourite food blogger/scientist Kenji Lopez-Alt has just released a video on the art of a smashburger which explains this technique in a bit more detail (although Big Fernand use MUCH bigger patties and manage to carry it off).

The order

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Pat and I both had the Bartholome, Beef, Swiss Raclette, bacon (lots of bacon), caramelised onions and chives, topped with Big Fernand’s own BBQ sauce. I admit, I ‘doubled up’ for €4, having only had a salad for lunch, which added a second patty, more bacon, cheese and an entire (totally unnecessary) portion of fries. Pat opted for ‘herb fries’ and I went for Paprika fries. All that for €14 (€18 for my double) – with our choice of soft drink. We were offered a choice of how we wanted the burgers cooked and both opted for medium.

The meat of it

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Holy moley. This was a monster. The slightly floppy, very simple seeded white burger bun barely stood up to the heft of a single patty, much less my double. The raclette was copious and melty, and the bacon in plentiful supply, providing a salty chew. The BBQ sauce provided a necessary sweetness, cutting back on the incredible umami from the rest of the burger. Whilst Pat detected a hint of sweetness from the onions, they were lost in my behemoth of a burger. Not a terrible thing given the general deliciousness of the burger as a gestalt.

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The meat itself was a cooked a bit over medium (unusual for France, where the colour ratings on meat are usually one down on what we order in the UK – i.e. medium is usually medium rare etc)., but the high fat ratio of the beef (essential in a smash burger) meant it was no less juicy for it, and the cheese, bacon and BBQ sauce complimented it beautifully. I think they could improve the bun – a sturdier potato roll or even a brioche bun might have stood up to the burger slightly better – but this is really a very minor concern in what was an otherwise magnificent mound of meat (and stuff).

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The fries… were slightly chewier than I’d expect for ‘freshly’ cooked fries (perhaps our batch wasn’t that fresh), and Pat’s herb fries were reminiscent of Honest Burger’s rosemary fries. But the seasoning was nice. They were served with a garlic aioli which was unnecessary (chips needed sweetness, not further saltiness!). Not bad as a combo at all!

Monkey finger rating

Bun –  3/5
Build – 5/5
Burger – 5/5
Taste –  4.5/5
Sides – 4/5
Value – 4/5 – €14/€18 translates to around £12-£15  for the burger, side and drink, and that’s definitely not bad, but probably a little on the high side vs. the very good value burgers you get in London these days. That said, this includes the ‘Brexit’ depreciation tax, given the value of the pound now vs June 22nd 2016…

Burger rating – 4.5/5 – I am totally going back the next opportunity I have to be in range. Fresh, delicious burgers, great service with amusing, interested staff happy to practice their English with us… and lots more to try.

The deets

Big Fernand has lots of locations, but the one we went to was here:  30 rue Ernest Renan, 92130 Issy-Les-Moulineaux. +33 1 41 90 72 55.

There’s even one in London if you can’t wait for the next Paris trip!  12 Percy Street W1T 1DY Londres, +44 207 81 32 586.

Burger &  Shake, Marchmont Street, London

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Good all rounder, over-ordered like crazy as a result. Hard shakes are ftw.

Burger Source

Having eaten our way through many of the mainstays of London burgerness, we are having to hunt harder for top shops to feed our (well, mostly my) burger habit. Friends wanted to meet near Holborn, so Burger & Shake it was to be. The other mooted venue was a Hoxton Burger, but I also wanted my first experience of the famous Hoxton Grill to be in Hoxton, rather than in the more generalist restaurant that supports the Hoxton Hotel in Holborn, so I vetoed it…

To call the website minimalist would be overstating things, but the menu does tell us this much: “Our 100% beef patty is made up of cuts from Aberdeen angus and charolais cattle, that graze in Ayrshire Scotland. We cook our beef burgers medium rare as standard…”

So far, so good.

The order

The friends who wanted to meet in the area (and who worked locally) were late. So we kicked off with some wings and some chilli fries. I kicked in for a “Bourbontun” hard shake, feat. Vanilla, peanut butter and bourbon… because obviously. Then came the main order; Jimjamjebobo and I split the House Burger (“180g beef patty, lettuce, tomato, pickle, American cheese and sweet cured bacon with our mustard and horseradish ketchup sauce”) and the New Yorker (“180g beef patty, lettuce, French’s mustard, Monterey Jack Cheese, pickle and fried onion. Served in our potato bun that is cooked with the patty under a cloche on the grill.”)

That’s when things started to go wrong (in terms of how much we ordered).  And I’ll take a lot of responsibility for this – I’d been ill for a few weeks and this was a first outing with friends in a while, so I was celebrating/commiserating the bloc of time out of commission with food.

And so we ALSO ordered onion rings. More chilli fries. A further double portion of wings. Mac & Cheese with bacon.  AND sweet potato fries. Even between five of us, this was WAY too much food.

The meat of it

NEW YORK NEEWW YORK
House burger

Both the burgers we ordered looked great – fresh, glazed potato roll, well stacked with a healthy six ounce patty that was clearly well cooked (if perhaps more the medium side of medium rare than the rare side). Grind, pack and fat ratio was good (I like my burgers like I like my women… coarse ground and loosely packed*), meat was juicy but not dripping, the build was excellent on first impression.

Then to the taste…

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The House burger was good, if perhaps lacking in the bangin’ beats the name and description promise. There wasn’t a hint of horesradish in the horseradish ketchup and, if I’m being critical, the patty was a little underseasoned. The bacon was good but not crunchy enough to provide textural contrast, and not enough saltiness. The bun and other fillings held up well, but there wasn’t quite enough umami in this one for me. Could be better.

The New Yorker came up trumps, though (no pun intended). The onions and pickle provided a lovely crisp, sweet finish, the monterey jack cheese added a salty oomph to the thing, and the whole was greater than the sum of its parts… although the burger did slide around on the onions something chronic.

If I’d had to choose between them from the descriptions alone, I’d have backed the House burger for the top job (everyone else ordered it), but the New Yorker came up from behind to win it all. Impressive work. Even if it’s less effective an analogy for the 2016 presidential raced than it initially seemed it might be.

As to the sides:

  • the wings were lush, substantial, crispy and perfectly coated with the uncle Frank’s hot sauce/butter combination that is Buffalo.
  • The chilli fries – weren’t seasoned before the addition of chilli (WHY, OH WHY?) so they were a bit bland and soggy, but the chilli was good as those things go. Depth of flavour and lovely hint of heat, rich meat and bean sauce in plentiful supply.  Regular fries would have been better in my view, but I think I’m perhaps the kind of guy who likes fries AND likes chilli, but doesn’t love them together.
  • The onion rings were disappointing for me; the batter hadn’t stuck, and the onions were glistening through like an exposed femur on an animated corpse. The flecks of pepper in the batter felt like false advertising; there was little flavour to them. That said, the onions were sweet and the batter crisp… just a few (major) minuses holding it back from excellence.
  • The first bowl of sweet potato fries were sent back as they were undercooked. The second batch were cooked but still somewhat limp and lifeless, and needed seasoning to oomph up.
  • The mac & bacon (no pic, soz) was fine but bland as I always find mac & cheese variants. Probably a reasonable example of the genre, if you were someone that had tried it enough times to care to differentiate between one bold of cheese mush and another.

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The bourbontun… OMG, this was delicious. Mostly a vanillla shake, the occasional glugs of peanut butter you get are like winning a mini lottery, and the bourbon gives a background hint that you’re not just indulging five year old you (ok, mostly you still are… but totes worth it). Definitely want to have this again, and I’m lactose intolerant!

Monkey finger rating

Bun –  4/5
Build – 5/5
Burger – 4/5
Taste –  4/5
Sides – 3.5/5 – slight losses for chilli fries and sweet potato shenanigans
Value – 4/5 – £23 a head for burger, a tonne of sides & drink, & tip – not cheap but reasonable value for the quality and quntity o the food.

Burger rating – 4/5 – only really suffering from a minor umami docking and some mediocrity around the sides. It’s a good place.

The deets

The small, diner-style restaurant is halfway down Marchmont Street. Full details: Burger & Shake, 47 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AP Tel: 020 7837 7718  info@burgerandshake.co.uk

* This is an Eddie Izzard reference… not a weird fetish.

The Refinery, Southwark

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Uninspired Wagyu burger with raw chips.

Burger Source

My new office is a 10 minute walk from Borough market, but it being the Christmas season, finding a lunchtime venue that isn’t heaving is slightly more complicated an undertaking than it should be. So the Refinery; a cavernous, uber-local bar/restaurant that bills on its menu once again – two burgers. A standard, and a Wagyu. I was curious and had planned to have lunch with a colleague so we popped down.

Part of the Drake & Morgan group, all the insight I got into the burger’s provenance was the simple word ‘Wagyu’ and having had a good experience at the Falcon, I thought – why not?

The order

It was a working day and I was lunching with a gym buddy so the order was restricted to the burger and a portion of ‘Cowboy fries’ – fries cooked with honey, chilli and garlic somehow – to share. We were reassured the burgers were cooked medium when we ordered; water was the only drink we needed.

The meat of it

When the food arrived, initial impressions were good. The brioche bun held a sizeable patty with nicely melted blue cheese, a sensible amount of salad, well stacked and well presented. The chips – well, they got the order wrong (delivering a portion each), and the honey/chilli/garlic combo resulted in a sticky mess in a tin cup. Not sure what we were expecting, I suppose… but we were expecting them to be cooked, which they weren’t. One bite was enough to dismiss the lot, and the restaurant staff were so busy we eventually sent them back rather than attempting to get a cooked batch delivered.

The burger itself… was a little disappointing. To list the things that weren’t quite right…

  1. it was swimming in a pool of mayo, making it slippery and unhandlable,
  2. the blue cheese was ok but didn’t add a huge amount to the burger
  3. the beef wasn’t cooked medium but was well-done (the photo below is slightly misleading; that pink is more lighting than meat-colour)
  4. there was nothing special about the taste of this ‘wagyu’ – nice but totally unspectacular
  5. the lean/fat ratio seemed a bit off; the burger wasn’t particularly juicy.

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On the plus side; the meat was coarse ground, loosely packed and well-seasoned. The blue cheese didn’t detract from it (if it didn’t particularly add to it), and, whilst slightly dry, the flavour profile was such that it didn’t particularly need any sauce – this was down to a good contrast between a very sweet brioche bun and an ultra savoury patty. The salad in the burger was crisp, juicy and fresh. The pickles were somewhat crisp but a little uninspiring – like they’d been sat on a plate a bit too long – and were served on the side.

Monkey finger rating

Bun –  3.5/5
Build – 2.5/5
Burger – 3/5
Taste –  3/5
Sides – 0/5
Value – 2/5 – £13.95 for a burger that’s just ‘meh’ at best with no sides is a lot.

Burger rating – 3/5 – Very mid-table in the rankings, the burger isn’t offensive but it definitely isn’t spectacular either.

The deets

The Refinery Bankside is in the base of the Bluefin building, about 7 minutes’ walk from Southwark tube, behind the Tate Modern. More detail here.

Guest post: Ferg Burger, Queenstown, NZ

Posted in Guest Post, International, Restaurant, ReviewsTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This is a guest post from fellow Burger-Lover and world traveller Dan Bond.

This burger too fergilicious for you babe.

The decision was made. Six weeks into a five-month around-the-world trip, we’d reached the other side of the world (New Zealand) but also the need to budget.

It turns out that income is pretty limited when you’re unemployed and don’t have any (as far as I’m aware, I’m not getting financially rewarded for this guest post), but there were indulgences we could cut back on: dining out being #1. We could handle that. We had a campervan. We knew how to boil water and put pasta into the water and then take it out again. It’d be fun, being self-sufficient. Fine. We left the Queenstown café in complete agreement. And walked down the street. And turned a corner. And stumbled into a bustling, overflowing queue, outside what transpired to be the 15th birthday party of Fergburger.

We TRIED to just walk past and pay no attention. But the customers were so animated, so delighted with what they were unwrapping. One particularly polite-looking middle-aged lady grappled with a burger larger than her face, which turned an increasingly meaty shade of red with each bite taken until diner and dinner became almost indistinguishable. It was a betrayal of either complete culinary delight or her slipping into early, pattie-induced stages of cardiac arrest. This was serious meat, evidently. Fine…we’d start budgeting after one more meal out.

Burger Source

Fergburger is one of those places you Google almost immediately after visiting. It invites curiosity. Apparently, 15 years in business and solid word of mouth buzz have seen its operations transition from a hard-to-find garage off Cow Lane to central Queenstown, Shotover Street. It did so via an international reputation and an avoidance of becoming a chain restaurant. Yeah! Rock on Ferg. The burger joint is now joined next door by Mrs Ferg Gelateria.

The order

So here’s the menu:

Fergburger menu

I doubt I could even imagine this number of burger variations, let alone do so and then deliver on the promise with actual food. The Chief Wiggum (in my opinion one of The Simpsons’ most underrated characters) caused a smile. But I went traditional; a Double Ferg with Cheddar Cheese, costing $15.50. I’m no financial advisor but $3 more for a whole other pattie seemed to me a big green tick in the economics department (omg, hardcore budgeting already implemented).

My girlfriend opted for the $14.50 Tropical Swine: New Zealand beef, streaky bacon, cheddar, pineapple, lettuce, tomato, red onion, aioli and tomato relish.

The meat of it

The food came in a paper bag heavy enough to lift respectably at the gym. My 2x patties were massive: one the size of a small frizbee, the other of a mildly disappointing pizza. All the expected ingredients (lettuce, tomato, red onion, relish) present and correct, and correctly proportioned.

This is the first burger I’ve had that brought to mind a perfectly balanced cocktail. I was expecting the much-touted meat to be the main event but while it was great, the ingredients lay in perfect symphony with each other to deliver one knockout overall taste. And all encased by the most glorious burger bap I’ve ever had. The bread! The hyperbole I could use to describe this bread…it’d be indecent. Crisp and a tad sweet at the first bite, with wholesome dough beneath the surface, the bap absorbs all the juices in the most satisfying way as you journey through the burger – like some NASA-designed food-supersponge developed exclusively for Heston Blumenthal’s signature range of edible appliances that somehow fills entirely with flavour yet never loses its form or becomes soggy.

It was miraculous. And I’ve no knowledge of Mr or Mrs Ferg or the inner workings of their personal security, but I wouldn’t not consider kidnap as a means of getting more of this bread of theirs.

We didn’t order fries because a.) we were clearly told we wouldn’t manage them b.) hellloooo, budgeting. But I did try the Tropical Swine, which was in its own realm of mind-bogglingly brilliant (the bacon thin, salty and very crispy, the pineapple fresh and not distractingly sweet). In the interest of delivering a balanced review, I should point out that I didn’t get two free gelatos in honour of Ferg’s 15th birthday (despite technically ordering a double burger) – just the one. But seeing as I, in my food coma state, couldn’t even consider approaching this single free dessert, I’ll let that slide.

And for the record, this isn’t the excitement of a guest blogger getting carried away with his first burger breakdown. We passed the place the following morning, at 8:20am, and there were people queuing for burgers. At 8:20am. And, if I’d hadn’t just recovered from the meat-sweats, I would have joined them once more.

Monkey finger rating

Bun – 5/5
Build – 5/5
Burger – 4.5/5
Taste – 5/5
Sides – N/a
Value – 5/5 – £7:50ish for all this?

Fergburger doesn’t do Twitter, but if it did, it’d probably be the best Twitter account in the world. Find them on your next world tour to New Zealand: 42 Shotover Street, Queenstown 9300, New Zealand.

Edwards of Conwy – Welsh Beef Steak Burgers – mini review

Posted in Home made, Reviews, Supermarket burgersTagged , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This blog is only three posts long and already I’m breaking the convention. Sorry.

But… I made a home made burger using a supermarket bought patty this weekend, which was so delicious I thought it deserved a little write up. Click here to read more about Edwards of Conwy’s excellent steak burgers. Here’s what the butcher tells you about them:

Made with prime cuts of Welsh beef forequarters and steak, we use a simple recipe and our secret seasoning blend to create our award winning Welsh Steak beef burgers. Each one is bigger than a quarter pounder and we make our burgers in thick patties which helps keep it juicy & succulent throughout the cooking process.

Disclaimer first: I struggle with home made burgers as I always get ‘the fear’ and end up overcooking them into charred, rubbery pucks of meat, dried out and past well past their best flavour. Determined and inspired by the great burgers of London, I attempted a proper medium finish… and achieved it, using a lid and will power – I managed to deliver a smokey, crunchy charred exterior and a perfect pink middle.

  
And with these ~6oz beauties… well, the taste was outstanding. Juicy and with a relatively thick grind on it, despite the necessities of packing for distribution, the flavour was rich and the texture was excellent. No additional seasoning required, when topped with dry-cure bacon, sweet pickle, condiments of your choosing and a particularly exciting Mexican style spicey sliced cheese – well, the flavour was incredible. The lid delivered a particularly satisfying melt on the cheddar too.

Recommended. Pleased I added it to the Ocado shop. No monkey finger rating due to self-build nature of the burger, but would heartily recommend both the cheese and the burger to anyone able to buy them.

For those curious about the rest of the burger build, it included:

  • Ocado brioche bun (one side toasted in bacon fat, warmed through)
  • Swedish sweet pickle
  • Crunchy salad
  • BBQ sauce (Heinz, could/should have got something fancy – next time)
  • Denhay dry-cure streaky bacon

Omnomnom.