For #LBBfinal updates and news about other young&foodish events like the Y&F Facebook page.
 

When Alexis Gauthier  accepted my challenge to create a one-off burger for the January 27th BurgerMonday at Andrew’s Gray’s Inn greasy spoon I assumed he would reinvent, deconstruct, Frenchify or otherwise gastronomise the American classic. But the chef at Gauthier Soho, one of London’s highest rated restaurants, chose to preserve the simplicity and integrity of a good burger-joint burger made with bun, patty, melted cheese, lettuce, onion and pink sauce.

Alexis did, however, seek an extra dimension, a special effect to distinguish his BurgerMonday cheeseburger. First he housed each fully assembled burger in its own plastic bag to seal in its moisture and warmth. Then, just before the burgers were served, he blew smoke into their bags from a portable food smoker burning maple wood chips.

This smoky cheeseburger, itself a sandwich, was sandwiched on a three-course menu between two sandwiches. Many managed to get through dinner without touching their knives and forks.

For the starter Alexis squeezed a chopped Caesar salad between two Parmesan crisps.

He layered his burger with an aged Argentine Wagyu beef patty, a slice of Manchego cheese, lettuce, red onion and Sauce Choron, a tomato-tinted Béarnaise. He maple-smoked the ensemble in a plastic bag and sent it out with golden panisses (chickpea fries).

For dessert Alexis and his team filled éclairs on the spot with more praline cream and whipped cream than the choux pastry was meant to hold. Oddly no one of the 80 served an éclair complained about the cream spilling from all sides.

“This éclair is not made with tweezers,” said Alexis. “It’s a real one, the one you’re going to have at home for your birthday.”

As burgers go the absolutely sensational smoked cheeseburger-in-a-bag was a real one, too, the one you’re going to have at home for your birthday, but only if Alexis brings his Wagyu, plastic bags, hand-held smoker and good cheer to the party.
 

 

All photos by Ian Sargent. Click here to see all of Ian’s photos from BurgerMonday with Alexis Gauthier.

In October 2012 German chef Oliver Trific travelled from his Hamburg house to a London public house to rewrite the origins of the round mound of renown. For one BurgerMonday night only the chef/proprietor of the Restaurant Trific imagined what a hamburger (little h) would be like today had it been invented in Germany and not the USA by a Hamburger (big H).

The Hamburg Hamburger unveiled at The Draft House proved to be much more than an exercise in culinary wordplay. For inspiration Trific looked to labskaus, a famous stew that is Hamburg’s version of corned beef hash. Liverpudlians know it as lobscouse or just scouse and attach their accent and identity to it.

[slider_pro id=”51″]
 

Deconstructing the labskaus, Trific replaced the mashed potato with fries; the sautéed shallots, with a smoky shallot mayonnaise; and the corned beef, with a Hamburg steak – the classic chopped- (minced-) beef steak introduced to Americans by German migrants. He redeployed traditional labskaus garnishes – beetroot, pickles, pickled herring, fried egg – as toppings, both actual and hopeful: To make the pickled herring more palatable to Londoners Trific prepared it as a salsa and served it on the side in small glass bowls.

The herring has many adoring predators, from sharks, tuna, whales and dolphins at sea to Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, Poles and Jews of Eastern-European ancestry on land. The British, they smell herring from one direction and they run in the other. With pickles, a quail egg and that dreamy smoked shallot mayo already on the Hamburg Hamburger few amongst BurgerMonday’s British majority  saw any need to traffic in Trific’s herring salsa. I insisted they had to try it, arguing that umami-rich fish sauces for steaks and, yes, burgers were very of the moment. If anchovies were good for classic British condiments like Worcestershire sauce and Gentleman’s Relish, I pleaded, why not a pickled herring salsa?

Judging six big-league burgers in a single go is no job to be taken lightly. The London Overground may stop at Kentish Town West station, directly over the railway arches of Camden Town Brewery, the competition venue, but it’s up to you to get your mind and body in the right place.

This video of the inaugural bash, held 29 October 2012, will hopefully motivate you for the upcoming one, @BurgerMonday #LondonBurgerBush 28-29 July. The competitors may not be the same this time as they were in October but the demands on you the voter will be just as great. Promise.

This, the third of four heats in the group stage of the championship, was won by Fred Smith of Fred’s. The second heat, in April, was won by Joe Grossmann of Patty & Bun. The winners of the four heats will compete in the finals, to be held in April 2014.

Designer Mike Abrahams

Mike Abrahams of the London design consultancy Abrahams attended several BurgerMondays and SpagWednesdays and was struck by the easy links made amongst strangers thrown together at shared tables. (What people will do to get their hands on a drippy, two-fisted bacon cheese burger!) In creating a pop-up logo Mike sought to represent young&foodish as the sum of these new connections.

Choosing to work with the Frankfurter Highlight font mostly because he couldn’t resist the foodish name Mike printed paper placemats each containing a single character from Y-O-U-N-G-&-F-O-O-D-I-S-H.

Photographer Paul Winch-Furness

At six consecutive pop-ups, including the 10th of November debut of WichThursday, the food and restaurant photographer Paul Winch-Furness took playful portraits of diners holding up – or goofing with – their lettered placements. He also encouraged the diners to self-assemble for group shots spelling out words, gibberish or fragments of either.

Designer Myra Murtagh

Mike’s colleague Myra Murtagh turned these images into two versions of the animated pop-up logo seen at the top of this website since November. The collaboration of Mike, Paul, Myra and all the obviously proud models who posed with their lettered placemats will run for just a few more weeks.

All photos by  Paul Winch-Furness

Only a fool tries to upstage Marcel Wanders by out-smiling, out-dressing, out-tanning, out-hairing or out-flirting the tall, dark and handsome Dutch designer. But were you to tie your hair in a bun, as Josh Pollen did, or hide your intense gaze behind protective goggles, as Mike Knowlden did, you might find it relatively easy to out-geek Wanders. These ingeniously inventive – and skinny – young chefs managed just that at the London launch for Flos of the beautiful Wanders Can-Can Lamp at the Galleria Illy pop-up this October.

Josh Pollen and Mike Knowlden

The co-founders, with Amy Houston, of Blanch & Shock Food Design managed this feat not with smoke and mirrors but rather with smoking styrofoam boxes of liquid nitrogen, iSi siphons loaded with CO2 cartridges and four ingeniously experimental ephemeral edibles flavoured with illy espresso:

• Pain au Chocolat Nitro Ice Cream with Illy espresso
• Nitro Cappuccino
• Malt Coffee ‘Grounds’ in Filters with Cobnut Milk
• Nitro-Aerated Coffee Microwave Sponge with Brown Butter Sauce and Powder

Possessing the taste if not mouth feel of a buttery croissant marbled with the finest dark chocolate and medium espresso, the pain au chocolat ice cream was as much the day’s design revelation as the Wanders lights. Even so, it was the cone-shaped paper filters filled with malt espresso nibs that stole the show. Knowlden and Pollen prominently displayed their filters on a table beside the staircase, near the gallery entrance, and no one could resist them. It appeared as though the fabulously fashionable folks who’d filled the Galleria space beyond capacity were pouring individual containers of cream over coarsely ground illy coffee and eating the stuff with a spoon. They were delighted to discover that the coffee grinds were actually snacky nibbles and the cream, cobnut milk. Blanch & Shock’s imaginative food pun was a big hit.

Message to Marcel Wanders: Never try to out-cobnut Mike Knowlden or Josh Pollen.

[oqeygallery id=32]

On the night of 28 November Knowlden, Pollen and Houston, three fast rising stars of the London food scene, made hay at my BurgerMonday pop-up. I mean that literally: They developed hay burger buns made with hay-infused roasted flour and reduced hay stock and slathered with smoked hay mayonnaise.

Admit it, London: There is no hope of any celebrity chef upstaging a geek in goggles, especially one whose sidekick has his hair in a bun, if smoked hay mayonnaise is part of the equation.

Lionel Lévy, the Michelin-starred chef at Une Table, au Sud in Marseille, loves to revisit the classics. The protégé of Gérard Garrigues and Alain Ducasse has made a name for himself with his bouillabaisse milkshake and other signature (re)inventions. He added another to his repertoire as guest chef at my BurgerMonday pop-up on the 23rd of May at Andrew’s Gray’s Inn greasy spoon in London. He merged two American standards, the burger and the BLT sandwich, replacing their customary condiments with the Provençal accessories he prepared at his restaurant, packed in sous-vide bags and stashed with ice packs inside his hand luggage for the flight from Marseille to London.

When just 15 minutes before service Lévy showed me the very first version ever of his stunning pop-up burger BLT I was startled. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, or how to eat it. As you can see in the video above many diners had the same initial reaction, if varied answers to the question: Which end is ‘wich?

Why did jaws drop throughout Andrew’s Gray’s Inn greasy spoon when London chef John Cadieux of Goodman steakhouses and butcher Darragh O’Shea of O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge revealed their BurgerMonday pop-up burger? Were diners expressing astonishment at the unreasonable height and drippiness of this bacon cheeseburger? Or was it more the reflexive action of carnivores stretching and shaping their mouths for the imminent entrance of that brioche bun and all the beef, special sauce and accoutrements John stacked beneath his homemade, egg-polished, sesame-seeded dome?

You decide. Analyse the pics in the event slideshow below by photographer Paul Winch-Furness. When you feel the lower portion of your mouth falling the first thing you must do is pick your jaw off the floor. Then ask yourself if this involuntary movement was triggered by intense feelings of astonishment or practicality.

[oqeygallery id=12]

slideshow photos by Paul Winch-Furness

5 Napkin built its reputation as well as its growing fleet of burger brasseries – the fourth 5 Napkin opens in Boston in a month and a fifth in Miami Beach’s South Beach soon after – on chuck meat. Even so, the introspective D’Amico was thinking the unthinkable: chucking some of the chuck.

D’Amico was restless. A chef with a passion for exploring new ideas, he was having a difficult time savouring the success of repetition, doing the same thing over and over again.

So where do you go after a 5 Napkin Burger? A 6 Napkin Burger? No, D’Amico decided to break the monotony of chuck by adding new cuts into his mince (ground beef) mix. He was after a beefier, steakier burger.

How, I’ve often wondered, did the unsung neighborhood Irish pubs of New York turn out such outstanding chopped steak burgers?  They weren’t sourcing locally and expensively from New York-area butchers (Pat LaFrieda, David Schweid) now as famous as the hot restaurants they supply (Minetta Tavern, Spotted Pig, Ai Fiori). D’Amico suspects the pubs relied on unsellable and therefore cheap cuts and scraps dumped by the national meatpacking plants. Who knew this was the stuff that great burgers were made of?

D’Amico’s idea was to incorporate somewhat leaner scraps of sirloin and, though no longer a bargain, hanger steak (thick skirt in the UK, onglet in France) into his chuck. To keep the fat content of his burgers at a steady, 5-napkin-worthy 20 percent D’Amico asked Schweid to supply him with a fattier blend of chuck than usual.

On 11 February 2011 at 11:38 AM D’Amico served me one of the first prototypes.

This photo does not lie: D’Amico’s new burger was deep-flavoured, as intended, and hit the 6-napkin mark, even if this was unintended. Importantly, it was black, crusty and caramelized like a steak on the outside, despite the deep-pink interior. The high contrast in colour and texture reflected an ideal that has eluded some burger chefs in New York and many more beyond the city line. I’ve yet to find a Londoner who can get the rouge et noir effect just right.

Not all burgers have to be crusty. On the same trip I introduced myself to the bash style burger, accessorized with caramelized onions, bacon jam, pickles, American (yellow) cheese and special sauce, at the new gastro winepub (not my term) Burger & Barrel on the northern frontier of Manhattan’s SoHo. Forget napkins: For this baby they should equip you with a disposable raincoat. When you’re devouring this sponge of succulent beef you’re not too bothered if there’s not much of a crust.The B&B bash burger, for all its messy merits, was no New York chopped steak burger. For that you have to have the blackened surfaces of D’Amico’s prototype.

Will D’Amico risk disappointing his most loyal regulars by replacing his 100-percent chuck burgers with the final version of his new blend? Will he commission a UK counterpart of that blend when he brings 5 Napkin to London in July for my BurgerMonday pop-up? In both instances he’ll have to convince himself first and his untroubled partners second. For them the success of repetition is leaving only a sweet taste.