Mayfields may be a window box of a storefront East London restaurant treasured for deftly crafted small plates of boutique produce, meat and fish. Yet there was nothing dainty about the steakburger chef Matthew Young created for the January 13th BurgerMonday, was there (see below)?
 


 
Matthew’s initial inspiration, the acclaimed burger at Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, served only as a departure point. His end burger was a true original drawing more on influences closer to home, with one innovation layered over another.

1. Bun

The sesame-seeded brioche was sourced from Bread Ahead, the London bakery and baking school opened at Borough Market by Matt Jones and Justin Gellatly. It marked the second BurgerMonday premiere of a Justin Gellatly burger bun: Three years earlier the buns Justin created at St John Bakery were showcased at a BurgerMonday by chefs James Lowe, Isaac McHale and Ben Greeno.

2. Beef

Matthew turned to a trusted supplier, Jorge Thomas of Swaledale Farms in West Yorkshire, and together they came up with a rich blend of three bistro steak cuts – flank, skirt, onglet – enriched with beef cheeks.

3. Cheese

When Beaufort, which Brillat-Savarin called “the prince of gruyères”, was melted over a patty the cheese’s nutty, butter character seemed to vanish before the chef’s eyes. His solution was to sit the Beaufort on the cut side of the top bun half instead and melt it under the salamander. Once the flipped and fitted atop the burger the cheese slowly dripped down over the toppings and patty.

4. Accessories

Lettuce, red onion, fresh mint, beet root, red miso-and-yellow mustard seed mayonnaise. The true revelations were the fresh mint, which enhanced the flavour of the beef (who knew mint was not only for lamb?) and the miso mustard mayo, with umami accent from the miso and some zip from the mustard.

5. Paper

Yes, paper. Karl Doering, one of Matthew’s sidemen, lined the griddles with parchment paper. The enormous benefit of this disposable, nonstick surface proved to be even, uniform cooking. As the burger grease collected in the parchment the patties were effectively fried in their own fat. Doering locked the patties in the deep pink zone between rare and medium-rare – the narrow space where outstanding burgers reside.

 
As the Mayfields burger was designed as a one-off I’m not sure we’ll ever it see again, sadly. (It is hoped Matthew will have second thoughts after he’s viewed the video and then third, fourth and fifth thoughts after he’s browsed Ian Sargent’s photos.) The surer bet is our seeing more burger chefs keeping the interior beef in the pink by frying their patties on parchment.

All photos by Ian Sargent.

Pavilion’s Breakfast Burger

Elliot’s Lunch Burger

Clutching Pavilion‘s brekkie burger is a fleeting thrill quickly surpassed by making it disappear before your eyes. It’s a wholly satisfying and extremely efficient way to both start and effectively finish off a weekend. Rather than spread your recommended weekend allowance of protein, fat, calories and very bad cholesterol over the course of two days the ground sausage patty, bacon, fried egg and melted Cheddar layered into this powerhouse breakfast-on-a-bun lets you get it done in five minutes, for a mere £7.50.

So practical, isn’t it?

Whatever.

I identified no fewer than eight serious problems with the one I ordered medium-rare.

From these photos can you tell what looks wrong with the Dalston Superstore Burger? Post your answers in the comments section below.

Three weeks shy of 30 and three months from running his own kitchen for the first time at autumn arrival Elliot’s Borough Market the Glaswegian has already held positions at Tom Aikens and The Ledbury in London, Marque in Sydney, Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York and, most opportunely, Noma in Copenhagen, named World’s Best Restaurant in April.

I am nevertheless impressed by McHale’s fleeting experiences abroad, first of all because he’s so up front about their laughably limited scope but, more significantly, from the multiple ways in which he’s been stimulated by them.

Only when you examine the timelines does McHale’s luminous work history begin to lose wattage. His spell at Noma under Rene Redzepi lasted only 3 weeks; his tutelage in the shadow of Momofuko’s David Chang, all of one day. Furthermore, his duties at those acclaimed restaurants were hardly challenging. When he wasn’t prepping cauliflower at Noma he was inside the refrigerator, scraping granita. Ah, the glamorous life of the kitchen temp.

It’s an oddity of apprenticeships: one protégé can spend 20 years working closely with a maestro and then accomplish little on his own, whereas another can stick around just long enough for a cup of coffee yet be nudged onto the path of true greatness. I think of the short but momentous few months Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi worked as an assistant in the Paris studio of Roumanian Constantin Brancusi.

McHale took stock of his backstage glimpse of Noma, even if he himself didn’t prepare any. He pushed himself to the front of the kitchen to help dress plates and marvelled at the organic, casual and deceptively simple look of dishes painstakingly composed to Redzepi’s exacting templates. He observed how the kitchen learned the nationality of every guest and sent out a chef who could explain various dishes to each diner in his native language. He felt the full force of Redzepi’s fervor for local sourcing and foraging. Out of faith, opportunism or a combination of both he now practices a religion where non-indigenous mangoes and coconuts are the forbidden fruits.

Normal people pull out their mobiles to show you recent snaps of their baby. McHale hands you his HTC Legend do show you up-to-date snaps of his baby radishes. A seed geek keen to revive vanished varieties of British heritage vegetables and fruit, McHale and Elliot’s have forged a partnership with Chegworth Valley Farm in Kent. That award-winning juice company will cultivate rarely harvested seeds for McHale and he’ll use their yield at Elliot’s, which is to source directly from Borough Market traders such as Chegworth. At the Pavilion pop-up he buried Chegworth radishes in an edible compost of black sesame seeds, a homage to or theft from –  take your pick – Noma and its signature Radiser amuse of radishes in a pot of soil.

Momofuko reinforced McHale’s appreciation for exceptional dining without the comforts traditionally associated with it. Not content just to have a casual restaurant with topless tables (no naperie) on both levels McHale wants the six seats and bar that will face Elliot’s open-kitchen downstairs to be set at the precisely the right heights to promote easy interaction between cooks and diners. He scouted the restaurants of New York with a tape measure in his pocket and regards the height of the chairs at Momofuko as a trade secret nearly as valuable as its recipe for fried chicken.

photo by Brian Jones

So will Isaac McHale be the next big thing? Hard to say. He cooked alongside Brett Graham at The Ledbury for 5 years and says it took that enormously talented chef almost as long to advance from cooking in the style of what he calls “London chefs doing French food” to one all his own. McHale will have to prove he can do the same, progressing from Noma themes, Ledbury riffs or Momofuko melodies. He must also learn to circumvent inevitable kitchen disasters such as the one last Friday that led to a main course of Old Spot pork shoulder as dry and tough as any in London.

photo by Brian Jones

Still I would not dare miss one of his Friday pop-up dinners, which are nearly sold out for the entire summer. The setting is spectacular; the wines are well chosen and much of the food, from chicken oysters in pine salt to Cornish mackeral with celtic mustard, is exquisitely conceived and prepared. Besides, if McHale does make it big you will want to be able to tell your grandchildren that you knew his beautiful radishes, carrots, spring onions and cucumbers back when they were still babies.
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Could the great lyricist Johnny Mercer have had pizza in mind when he matched these lines about love’s uncertainties to a Hoagy Carmichael melody?  The fatalism in the song How Little We Know reflects my own doubts ever since I fell madly in love, almost nine hours ago, with the pizza at Pizza East, a two-day-old restaurant in the Tea Building (56 Shoreditch High Street, London – see map. Tel 020 7729 1888).

Lunching in a near empty venue where the staff outnumbered the customers by a ratio of perhaps 15-to-1, my Margherita pizza (£6) was the best I’ve ever had in London. It was more distinctive, stylistically, than the pizzas at all but one of London’s more accomplished pizzerias, Story Deli. Rather than merely emulate the Neapolitans, Australian chef Bernie Plaisted has looked to pizzerias in Sydney and Los Angeles for some crisp thinking. His pizza is crisp to the core, unlike its soft-centered counterparts in Naples, yet extremely light, airy and delicately chewy. Evidence suggests that the charred, blistered and bubbly cornicione (puffy outer rim) was inspired by the sourdough crust at Pizzeria Mozza in LA. It compresses exquisitely to the chew. The English difference entails dusting the dough with fine Maldon sea salt. It the pizza too salty? Maybe. Would I like them to use less salt? No. The Maldon almost becomes a flavour as much as a seasoning. I love it.

The mozzarella is Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP – the best that GBP can buy. Pizza East drains the cheese, as it must, only not excessively so. The scattered patches of cheese do melt and ooze some as the pizza bakes in the wood-and-gas-fired oven, but the transformation from solid state towards a liquid one does not turn the whole disk into one milky mess. Devotees of Franco Manca pizzeria at Brixton Market take notice: the surface geology of a Margherita requires molten masses of mozzarella floating alongside fresh basil atop a shallow pool of sweet roma tomatoes over a lunar-like landing. If the cheese is dry, chewy, stringy, tough or otherwise detached from those other elements the ensemble suffers. (I appreciate that Franca Manca’s Giuseppe Mascoli can not afford to use such an expensive cheese given his incredibly low prices. But it would be nice to have the option to pay a couple of pounds more for something better.)

My second pizza at today’s lunch was an extraordinary vongole variation (£12) topped with clams, oregano, cherry tomatoes, garlic, red chili flakes, butter and, most controversially, grated pecorino. This violation of the no-cheese-with-seafood mandate was immediately overshadowed by the defiance of not so much a rule as an unspoken trust assuring all, regardless of age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or economic standing, that every pizza topping be edible if not palatable. Pizza East baked the vongole pizza with the clams left in their shells and then served the it that way. I could understand their removing the clams from the shells after the pizza had been baked but couldn’t fathom their leaving this chore in my hands. This would only slow me down when speed was of the essence. From my experience eating clam pizzas at Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut I’d learned that no pizza variety loses more of its appeal as it cools and dries. And that’s why leaving the clams in their shells is such a clever bit of total insanity. It keeps them warmer longer, in their broth. (Some entrepreneur, maybe a Dragons’ Den aspirant, should invent a pizza-sized clam shell to replace the thermo insulated pouches now used by pizzerias for home delivery.)

So why am I concerned that Pizza Love will burst my bubble? First, hands-on consultant Bryant Ng, who was chef de cuisine at LA’s Mozza and has overseen the development of the Pizza East pizzas, leaves after dinner service on Monday – day 4. Plaisted, a capable and serious chef who cares about the quality and compatibility of his ingredients, may be able to manage for awhile without Ng at his side. But will his brigade of freshly trained pizzaiolos be able to maintain the high standards as word spreads and this ground-level warehouse fills up with Shoreditch trendhounds? And can they avoid cornicione creep – the infringement of the bubbly crust towards the middle of the smallish pizzas?
These are open questions that even Nick Jones of the Soho House Group, the backer of this venture, may not be able answer. For now I must take comfort in Johnny Mercer’s wise words of resignation:

Maybe it’s just for a day
Love is as changeable as the weather
And after all, how little we know