Sure there were peasants who by circumstance or choice sought out the fattier bits of fatty meats. They regarded the streaks of marbling running through beef as thoroughfares of flavour and happiness. But it’s unlikely many striving for acceptance in genteel London managed to be as unabashed about their preference for the bad white stuff as Walter Matthau, who, as Oscar Madison in Neil Simon‘s The Odd Couple, tells the New York waitress: “Give me a corned beef on rye, all fat.”

Euphemism crept into the brine for salt beef when the British counterpart to New York Jewish corned beef moved up from London’s East End to to its West End. In the 1950s, if you stepped into one of the salt beef bars on Great Windmill Street and wanted a cutter like Bambos Georgiou to make you a sandwich with enough fat left on the meat to clog even your peripheral arteries you didn’t say so in quite those words. Likewise, the proper punters who followed Georgiou to the Brass Rail, the salt beef bar he helped open at Selfridges London flagship in 1966, used three polite, deceptively undemanding words to communicate their partiality for cuttings of the unlean variety.

And even now in the naughty post-Naughties, when trendy eaters are less inclined to have their meat trimmed of fat than their fat trimmed of meat, you mustn’t say as much to the cutters at B & K, the suburban salt beef bar Georgiou opened with Jerry Kosimar in 1967. If you do so at either the original location in Edgware or the newer Harrow outpost one of his sons, Michael or John, may correct your English, as he did mine.

“The next time you come in,” advised John Georgiou, “if you want it that way just ask for it ‘as it comes'”.

By this he meant fat-glistening slices of salt beef cut from a brisket with its fat side left largely intact. Untrimmed. As it comes.

The menu positioning of the skirt-n-chips does a disservice only to the easily overlooked selections listed below it: suckling pig and dandelion, sea bass, baked celeriac & shard, bacon & beans. Like a vaudeville comic asked to take the late-show stage after the Marx Brothers you just don’t want to be billed beneath the St John’s take on steak frites. Here that classic duo is a crusty, crispy, saucy, succulent and thoroughly satisfying act to catch ’round midnight or thereabouts.

At £16.40 it would be one of the most alluring late-night relationships between quality and price anywhere were it not for a push-up wine list with premiums that make its exclusively French options look more fully bodied than they are (an act of illusion hardly foreign to Leicester Square). Having steak frites without red wine goes against my belief system, no matter how late the hour, but so does paying double, triple or quadruple the price of those steak frites for a bottle.

Please please, Mr Henderson, add a good, young £20 table red to the wine list, even if you have to list it in small print at the very bottom, beneath your phone number and url. Otherwise any overpriced alternatives printed below it might become as unnoticed as the poor schnook asked to close for Groucho.

The bacon patty is positioned directly atop the beef patty, essentially creating a double burger with an even distribution of bacon flavour and fat in every bite. You may lose much of the bacon’s crispness, which is a bad thing, but through the mingling of matching minces the beef and pork become inseparable, which is a very good thing –  at least until the greasy meats reach your stomach.

The patty-backed bacon burger was made famous by Hodad’s Burgers, which opened right off San Diego’s Bacon Street (I kid you not) in 1969. Hodad’s simmers strips of American-style bacon (British streaky rashers) until they shred easily, drains and chops the boiled bacon and shapes the bits into a thin patties. Meatwagon appears to follow the same practice. Both sides of the patties are fried on the griddle under the weight of a bacon press or, in the home version, a spatula and a strong hand. (Click here for detailed text version of recipe seen in video below for Hodad’s bacon cheeseburger).

Was The Ivy burger good enough to justify its £13.75 (about $21) price?

The Ivy burger was every bit as good as it looks in the photo: Nice shape and proportions, terrific bun (see the air pockets), the model of medium rare. The gentlest squeeze released deep reserves of juice. BP’s best engineers would not be able to seal its leaks.

But was it worth £13.75? Not at first bite. The Ivy burger was a middleweight with no premium accessories. Forget foie gras or truffles: this baby didn’t even come with cheese, bacon or chips (fries). Pale chips were £4 extra. For what you do and do not get this had to be the most expensive burger in London.

Or maybe not. Three-quarters into The Ivy burger I discovered the house secret: The waiter brought me a finger bowl. That’s right, a finger bowl. Without my requesting one. Without charging me extra for the fresh lemon, most likely organic, and the water expertly warmed to the ideal temperature. Bet you can’t name many burger joints that do that. Begins to make £13.75 seem like a bargain, doesn’t it?

Only later did I realise the waiter had not given a finger bowl to my companion, who had also had a burger. This could only have meant one of two things: Either the waiter had recognised me as the founding director of burgermonday meatups and thereafter afforded me the special treatment The Ivy only gives to A-list celebrities or I just had a lot more grease on my hands than my companion did.

The only bummer was the bun.There were unsightly cracks on the surface of the top half, while the lower half was soaked and squished to the point where the bottom side of the burger patty was left virtually bare. My burgermonday group wouldn’t like that. I approached Torode at the kitchen pass and gave the MasterChef judge my critique:

“Eating it”, I told him without intent of sexual innuendo, “felt like holding a hot, greasy piece of meat in your hands”.

“Hmmm”, smirked Torode without missing a beat. “That’s one I haven’t heard before”. First I had egg on my hands. Now I had egg on my face.

Torode agreed the bun for a burger as explosive as his needed to perform better. He pledged to have new ones in place for the bloody burgermonday meatup at The LUXE in Spitalfields on the 26th of July.
Click here to book your place.

The next youngandfoodish Steak Frites Tasting Dinner will be Tuesday 25 May in the private dining room of Racine Restaurant in London.

The menu will again feature three steak classics – onglet aux échalottes, filet au poivre, côte de boeuf – prepared by chef Henry Harris with the finest cuts of dry-aged, grass-fed beef selected by Darragh O’Shea of the great London butcher O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge. Each steak will be matched to a red wine selected by Peter Lowe of Berkmann Wine Cellars:

Space is limited. Book now.

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Mastering the cuts – watch the videos

Why do you love steak frites? – see the winning response in #steakfrites twitter competiton

At the restaurant where I apprenticed in France I was taught to press the fleshy part of my relaxed palm, just beside my thumb, and look for the same soft texture in my steaks. It takes some practice.

The poke test is ineffective for burgers. Mince (ground meat) does not firm up in the same way. To check a burger for doneness you can instead try gauging its doneness according to the darkening colours and drying topography of the burger’s exterior as it cooks or, for greater confidence and precision, use a meat thermometer.

The version seen above was requested to be on the rare side of medium rare.

The image I chose for the twitter profile of @burgermonday is a photograph of a burger that is both remarkable and British.

Why remarkable? Why British?

That yellow goop you see dipping down irresistibly from the sides of the Rivington Grill burger is not merely melted cheese. It’s Welsh rarebit – exceptional Welsh rarebit made with the highest quality Cheddar and bestowed with a wonderful nuttiness.

With the Cheddar and the umami-rich Worcestershire sauce in the rarebit sauce, chef Simon Wadham imparts a umami taste and a British identity to a nicely formed and optimally proportioned burger. (To see a rare version of the Rivington rarebit burger click here).

The Rivington luxury burger (£12.75 on the all-day bar menu) adds still more umami with rashers of bacon and tops off the production with a egg for good measure.

A burger at the Rivington isn’t what I would call greasy, but it is a truly OILy – “only in London” – experience and as good a place as any to begin the #burgermonday conversation.

28-30 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, EC2, 020 7729 7053

178 Greenwich High Road, Greenwich, SE10, 020 8293 9270