The Cheeseburger Trilogy, Part 2: An Open Letter to a Burger-Challenged Nation

After all these years, Britain still just doesn't understand burgers. But we can help each other.

SECTION 1: REQUIEM FOR A BEEFY DREAM

Dear United Kingdom,

You know I love you. I love your sturdy brown ale, I love your Cheddar cheese, I love your weird obsessions with rhubarb and asparagus when they’re in season. And boy, do I love your free healthcare (even if lately we’ve been getting what we pay for). I could hardly hope for a more liveable place to call my adopted home, and I can’t think of anywhere I’d prefer to raise my children. That is the genuine truth.

But we have a problem.

Allow me to be blunt: as a culture, you fundamentally do not understand burgers. Let me reiterate that I say this out of love. I only want you to be your best burger self. I want to help you.

I will preface this by saying that over the past 15 years, the state of British burgers has greatly improved. In 2010, a sudden burger boom took London by storm, led by start-ups like MeatLiquor and Byron, and supported by dozens of smaller but no less influential operators like Bleecker, Lucky Chip, Mother Flipper, Patty & Bun, and Daniel Young’s ‘Burger Monday’ events. Soon, VC-backed American behemoths like Five Guys and Shake Shack began their hostile takeover of the high street.

The explosion of good burger joints (the Big Burger Bang, if you will) has had a lasting impact on the broader burger scene in the UK, and the baseline standard for burgers has risen across the board, a high burger tide that has lifted all burger boats. Even McDonald’s has noticeably improved their products since I moved here in 2008. And now the TikTok generation has discovered good burgers for themselves, flocking to buzzy new outposts like Supernova, The Plimsoll, and Jupiter.

And yet: most British burgers still suck. Whether they’re served at dedicated restaurants, pubs, greasy spoons, or backyard barbecues, a fundamental misunderstanding of burgers basics persists, and I’d venture that in the majority of British towns, there may be nowhere to get a truly good burger.

Exhibit A: A terrible burger from a popular chain.

The situation is unfortunate, but understandable. Burgers are a cultural import. You don’t know how to make burgers for the same reason that we Americans don’t know how to make a cup of tea: we just don’t fucking get it.¹ America is coffee country. And this is exactly the problem with burgers in the UK. Americans have a certain burger intuition that the British are only beginning to develop.

The first and biggest problem with British burger culture is something of a paradox: most people see burgers as a cheap, plebeian food that is not to be taken seriously, but when they do take them seriously, they swing too far in the opposite direction, over-embellishing them in attempts to ‘elevate’ them into something ‘gourmet.’ Indeed, the burger chain everyone was going to before 2010 was called Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Gag me with a spoon. Burgers should never – ever – be described as ‘gourmet.’

Burgers must be cheap, but they must also be taken seriously. Many countries (Japan comes to mind) are very good at taking cheap things seriously, and delivering them well. But this is at odds with deep-rooted British attitudes that have to be fully unpacked and dismantled in order for us to have good burgers. Britain is an inherently classist society due to its perverse and infantile obsession with the monarchy, which has led to a general disdain for anything associated with the working class. I believe there’s an element of self-flagellation involved in this attitude: a subconscious but persistent notion that poor or even middle-class people aren’t allowed nice things because we’re all bunch of lowly peasants. Our food is for sustenance so we can go back to work and serve the King. Food is not to enjoy. Enjoyment is for rich people.²

In America the working class is treated like dirt, too, but in certain instances this is overridden by the very American idea that every individual should get whatever they want, when they want it. Obviously, this mindset has given us all sorts of problems, and the burger can be seen as an emblem for all that is bad about America and American ideologies. As the hills of Los Angeles are burning³ in a disastrously climate-changed atmosphere, it would be irresponsible and stupid to act like burgers are perfectly benign. Eating meat is a problem.

Beyond their environmental impact, burgers are laden with all sorts of other nutritional and moral considerations to contend with. Fatty meat, processed cheese, refined flour: all bad for you. And the demand that burgers must be cheap means that there are exploitative labor practices at every point along the production chain.⁴ In so many ways, burgers are not just a symbol but a tangible cause of the devastation wrought by unfettered American greed, and the dream of cheap but sustainable and morally sound burgers may not even be worth dreaming. Maybe – probably – we should stop eating burgers entirely.

Me, eating a burger. Also: me, being American.

And yet: even though we’re fully aware of these issues, our emotional connection to burgers is impossible to overcome. This love we have for burgers – a genuine, profound, visceral love – must be taken just as seriously as the problems they pose, for this is what makes them so difficult to abandon. British and American alike, so many of us stare lovingly at burgers and wonder why can’t I quit you? It’s not just how they taste, or how they satisfy like nothing else. It’s also because of collective and individual sense-memories and cultural values⁵ – good ones! – that we share: Everybody deserves a hot, beefy, bready meal. Everybody deserves a full belly, for as little money as possible. Everybody deserves a treat.

Perhaps this is key to understanding how approach burgers: they’re a treat. And this is where our ‘Special Relationship’ comes in, because British people are fantastic at treats. In Britain, anything can be a treat, because the British are an abstemious and unassuming people who don’t expect very much. A cup of Tetley’s and a digestive biscuit? That’s a treat. Floppy, thin, sad pancakes with sugar and lemon? Also a treat! A walk in the mud followed by a tepid pint of flat beer? You got yourself a treat there, fella. Nobody rejoices in the utterly banal better than the British. The only qualification for something to be called a ‘treat’ is that it must be very slightly outside of one’s usual routine.

Burgers as a treat – ‘a sometimes food,’ in the words of Cookie Monster – could be part of the transition to a (shudder) burger-free future. But if we have to save burgers for special occasions, and if we must ultimately say goodbye to burgers forever, it is our duty to do them justice while they last. If burgers must die, let us eulogise them. Let us celebrate before we mourn.

SECTION 2: TOWARDS A MORE BEAUTIFUL BURGER TWILIGHT

Making burgers ethically and eating them infrequently is at odds with the inviolable precepts that burgers should be cheap⁶ and ready at a moment’s notice. But even if burgers can’t (and shouldn’t) be inexpensive and constantly available, there is an egalitarian spirit in burger culture that we should try to preserve. Accessibility and unpretentiousness are absolutely key. You don’t need any kind of education, etiquette or prior knowledge to enjoy a burger. Burgers have no dress code. Let me reiterate: burgers are not gourmet.

This is all to say that if you want to make and eat burgers as good as those in America, you have to start thinking like an American. Cast any sense of nobility, propriety, and self-denial as far out of your brain as you possibly can, and replace those hang-ups with a voice that simply shouts I WANT HOT CHEESY BEEF!

It is only after you have fully embraced your inner cowboy that you can begin to make good burgers. But what is a ‘good burger,’ anyway? Who gets to decide this? Well, the short answer is: Americans. We get to decide what good burgers are, because we invented them, and we eat tons of them. But this answer is unsatisfactory because there are just so many ways to make a good burger – there is no consensus. And this is also key to burgers’ appeal: they are customisable. I recoil at recipes for so-called ‘ultimate’ burgers or prescriptive methodologies, because the perfect burger should be perfect to you, and fuck what anyone else thinks! (This attitude is also very American.)

To this end, I am not going to provide a burger recipe, but instead a kind of guide: a framework for understanding how to create a great burger that suits your taste – provided, of course, that you have good taste in burgers. And you do have good taste in burgers, right? Good. Then let’s get started.

TO BE CONTINUED IN SECTION 3: THE BURGER BLUEPRINT

1. Indeed, we have a deep-seated antipathy towards tea, ever since we chucked it in the harbor 250 years ago.

2. I think there is some centuries-old religious repression baked into this as well, which I don’t quite understand. America was founded by Puritans and we still have an Evangelical Christian problem, and yet we are most unabashedly greedy and gluttonous people on earth. What’s the deal?

3. Incredibly, this Bad Religion song is twenty years old. I think the fires were meant to be a metaphor, but they sure as shit ain’t a metaphor now.

4. There’s also the small issue of, you know, killing animals. Simon Amstell’s Carnage (2017) brilliantly satirises the hypocrisy all of us carnivores live with. Definitely worth a watch (or re-watch).

5. Admittedly, these values have been partially formed by marketing and advertising, but that doesn’t diminish their significance.

6. Cheap is relative, of course. If ethical burgers are expensive, then in an ideal world, we should all have more money to buy them. I call this UBI: universal burger income.