You don’t beat Josh Ozersky, the New Yorker who wrote the book on The Hamburger, at his own game. So when Richard Turner invited Fred Smith and I to compete against Josh in a NYLon Burger-Off at the Meatopia UK Meat Festival in September we agreed the only way to go was British.
 

British Beef

One advantage of British grass-fed beef over American grain-fed is the distinctive flavour of each cut. Rather than blend two or more cuts into our patties and blur some of what makes each different Fred and I had a thought: If you could have a single malt Scotch, a single origin coffee or a single varietal Champagne why not a single cut burger?

Fred set up a blind tasting at Byron, where he is Head of Food. We tried four patties each made from a different cut of the finest dry-aged Scottish beef from the London meat merchants Turner & George. The revelation was just how different the flavour of each patty was. The single cut patties preserved the individual character of their respective cuts. Each was a singular sensation.

British Cheese & British Sauce

Fred created a homemade 100% British burger cheese that would melt like American plastic burger cheese but taste like classic Welsh rarebit, the umami-rich cheese sauce traditionally poured over toast. The burger sauce was effectively in his cheese.

British Bun

From Flourish Craft Bakery we found a lovely English muffin with wonderful “squeeze” yet enough oomph to stand up to the beefy juices and cheesy ooze.

British Win

At the NYLon burger-off #TheSingleCut killed in two ways: It killed Josh, whose forceful first bite of our British burger spurt fatty juices into the crowd and drew a chorus of gasps, and it killed those tortured carnivores who followed the action but didn’t get so much as a nibble. Not wanting this to be remembered as one big tease we vowed to bring back the #SingleCut for a single night before the end of the year.

That night is BurgerMonday the 2nd of December.

photos by Paul Winch-Furness

SpagWednesday Week is my video mix of photos taken by Paul Winch-Furness at six SpagWednesday pop-ups organised in London by young&foodish.

The featured guest chefs are Arcangelo Dandini of L’Arcangelo in Rome, Rowley Leigh of Le Café Anglais in London, Giorgio Locatelli of Locanda Locatelli in London, Francesco Mazzei of L’Anima in London,  Tom Oldroyd of the Polpo Restaurant Group in London, Rachel O’Sullivan of Spuntino in London and Massimo Riccioli of La Rosetta in Rome.

Art direction is by the graphic design consultancy Irish Butcher.

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From burgers on Mondays to spaghetti while seated in greasy spoons on Wednesdays, the latest foodie gatherings are all about eating a specific dish for each day of the week, cooked by a different chef….
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Much as you may love the retro snaz of the 1960s plaids and checks sported by those dashing Mad Men I propose to you an altogether different pattern for spring/summer 2012.

Behold the young&foodish beehive, created by the graphic design duo Irish Butcher as a placemat for everyday dining, except Sundays:

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

slideshow photos by Paul Winch-Furness

Great fan though I am of Polpo, Polpetto and their new sibling sensation Spuntino, Wednesday the 13th of April was probably not the best night to be dining at any of these madly popular restaurants in London’s Soho. That’s because Spuntino head chef Rachel O’Sullivan and group chef Tom Oldroyd took that afternoon and night off to prepare 350+ meatballs for my SpagWednesday meatballs and spaghetti pop-up dinner (see photos above by food photographer Paul-Winch Furness) at the Gray’s Inn greasy spoon Andrew’s.

Rachel and Tom sent out heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs with wedges of focaccia to 66 SpagWednesday twirling slurpers who did with it what SpagWednesday twirling slurpers do: They ate like kids and dined like princes.

Although some Italian purists insist you shouldn’t serve bread with pasta, piling starch upon starch, the Spuntino chefs concluded that the far greater crime would have been to leave a roomful of urbane Londoners with traces of homemade tomato sauce on their plates but no bread with which to mop it up. The only viable alternative would have been for diners to use their fingers, which, though hardly unheard of at young&foodish pop-ups, is perhaps not the preferred medium.

Don’t miss out on the fun at my next pop-up. Join the young&foodish community now and as a member you’ll receive email alerts about upcoming SpagWednesday and BurgerMonday pop-ups as well as advance booking privileges.

Neither is this a review of Les Deux Salons’ Scottish beef cheeseburger. No juice oozed from that too-lean patty when I pressed my fingers into the bun, nor did excitement spill into my mouth when I sunk my teeth into it. It was serviceable and cooked as ordered, but hardly worthy of further consideration, by me or by you.

My concern here relates to the croutons Les Deux Salons served to accompany its Mediterranean fish soup. Croutons are one of three accessories presented alongside most traditional soupe de poisson. The diner dabs the croutons to his or her taste with rouille (chilli-spiced aïoli), tops them with finely shredded Gruyère and lays them on the surface of the hot soup. Les Deux Salons’ croutons possessed the thin, elegant form of a Chanel model, but they were too long to fit horizontally within the diameter of their white porcelain soup bowl. You couldn’t float these rafts in the soup any more than you could a battleship in a bathtub without compromising the structural integrity of the vessel.

Could the oversize soup crouton situation have escaped the attention of the French servers? Surely they observed frustrated diners like me fumbling with the croutons before breaking these slender beauties into shards, leaving crumbs all over the table for them to clean up. Regardless, it’s unlikely anyone brought this to the attention of head chef Craig Johnson and executive chef Anthony Demetre with the urgency required to necessitate a course correction.

I asked my French waiter if the croutons looked too big to him. He dutifully replied that they were as the chef designed them and that the diner was expected to break the croutons. Really, I thought? I’ve lived in Marseille and wrote a book about its cuisine: Never was any restaurant diner expected to break a soup crouton. It occurred to me that Les Deux Salons might have a communication problem that is often a consequence of top-down management in business, government and the military. I broached the subject with organizational psychologist Jo Jordan. In response she posted the  7 Reasons Why Your Employees Won’t Tell You Bad News on her blog.