“I actually made my own burgers last weekend, so I have eaten quite a few burgers recently.” So went the least interesting conversation I’ve heard this side of New Year. I am eavesdropping on two people I take to be co-workers – or perhaps they are two robots programmed to “human mode” – as we stand in line for the city’s most zeitgeisty sandwich. I suspect the food will be better than the patter; this would be as serious an accomplishment as outsmarting a horse.
Anyway. London’s bourgeoisie are at it again! The city is awash with enterprising men flogging that most proletarian of meals to the corporate middle classes. I am talking, of course, about the humble, the honest, the lumpen burger. And there’s been a style evolution: bon voyage to the primacy of Byron Burger, serving up fists of mince and chewy bacon, with seven toppings more than necessary, so large the diner needs to dislocate their jaw like a snake to get a bite.
No, over at Supernova or round the corner at Junk, or a few stops east at Dumbo, the Byronic era is out and the “smash burger” is in. Think thin, hot, fatty, salty, crispy patties (and all those other words that designate “delicious”), served in a parsimoniously blunt style: soft bun, ketchup, maybe mustard, a pickle if you ask nicely. The world looked on the rococo excess of Gourmet Burger Kitchen and Byron and said no more – whatever happened to Protestant minimalism?
There is very little to dislike about a burger in this post-Reformation style. And so I head out for a working lunch to confirm my biases – off to the eye-catchingly named HANBAAGAASUUTEEKI. I felt like a fool writing that, and you probably feel like a fool reading it. But I am told it comes from the phoneticised Japanese for “hamburger steak” – what the hell, sure. Just don’t say it out loud in the office, lest you fancy a telling off from the HR department and an invitation to a racial-sensitivity training session.
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And guess what? The burger is great. So good, in fact, that I nearly forget that I am sitting outside, in the freezing cold, with a friend (who is hungover, terrible company) on Buckingham Palace Road. Don’t let the glamour of the address fool you. This is about the worst-located restaurant in central London I have ever encountered. I am surrounded by smog, noise, ugly nondescript glass offices, the ambient squalor of Victoria Station and rows of shops selling monarchist tat to credulous tourists. The burger doesn’t exactly transport me out of that and on to the open highways of the American Midwest. But it does soften the blow.
I want to think that this is lunch without airs and graces, that this is a sandwich of the people. And this burger is not about to slip into Latin. If you came here expecting canard à la presse you would be sorely disappointed. It is quick, fast, casual and bad for you: lunch straight from the imagination of Homer Simpson.
Or that is, at least, the aspiration. But the restaurant – don’t make me write the name again – does not pull off the shtick. That you can order a bottle of natural white alongside your fries somewhat disrupts the illusion – Homer Simpson expects his wine to be high intervention, one can only suspect. The minds behind HANBAAGAASUUTEEKI (ugh) asked themselves an urgent question: how to serve that democratic, high-margin sandwich without alienating the corporate slickers of SW1? Offer them some pét-nat, of course.
Across London, these places all promise to satisfy a bourgeois itch for a working-class lunch; to let the laptop class cosplay as old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth East Coast union workers. And, far be it from me to complain – the food is uniformly good, and I would never be angry at a sandwich shop confident enough to serve wine (no matter how disruptive it is to the overall aesthetic mission). But it is a spiritually confused endeavour – akin to, for instance, finding Bruce Springsteen at Davos.
[Further reading: Beer and Sandwiches: At the Denbigh Castle in Liverpool]
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