With everything so bloody close around here, do we need a burger delivery service?
W1 is steadily filling up with a consortium of various burger options for the discerning punter: Burger and Lobster if you like it posh, pricey, with a flute of the Gallic bubbles, MEATLiquor for dirty, dive-y, drunky bites; Tommi’s for a quick munchjavík; Honest if you want it retro-enamelled-rustic and all the British; Spuntino, Mishkin’s, Opera Tavern (and the newly opened SliderBar) for all those who want to feel like they’re in Lilliput; Kua ‘Aina if you like, erm, Hawaiian and GBK for everyone with the orienteering skills of a lemming on a High Street. Yep, there’s a few.
But a burger delivery service? Now that is a new one.
A resounding BNJR to #BRGR then - the latest pop-up, with some impressively hash-slick branding, starting their attempt at London domination with a burgers-on-bicycles to-your-door service. By sheer happenstance, working within the catchment area granted me the opportunity to try the first outing for their self-labelled ‘sliders’.
It arrived a bit outside of their specified 30-45 minute window, delivered by a smartly dressed dude. He even shook my hand! Chipper. I mean, imagine if the Domino’s guy did that? You’d be standing there in your sweats being all like ‘WTF?’, right?
The two burgers, nestled inside the little branded box, came tightly wrapped in a multi-layered greaseproof paper/tin foil cocoon for heat retention.
These are ‘sliders’ in the mini-burger definition of the sense. They look cracking - two perfectly formed, glossy gems. The Ginger Pig beef patty is surprisingly thick for such a teeny thing, and tearing it in half unveiled a pleasingly uniform medium pinkness. Miller’s bake their doughy touchdowns, and these are no exception: soft and pliable yet sturdy. This helps the focus stay on the small-but-mighty chunk of meat, with the standard helpings of ketchup and mustard deftly applied.
The wrapping serves to steam the buns in a proper slider-like way, helping flavours infuse and turning the cheese into a delightfully sticky liquid goop which you can gleefully mop off the foil. A sad down-side was a lack of moisture, making it not quite a chore to eat, but you acknowledge the effort it takes to chew (maybe down to the diminutive size of the patty not holding as much juice). We can understand the reluctance to over-stuff such a small burger, but more condiment, pickle, and maybe some onion may well have helped. They were also lukewarm, an understandable disadvantage of delayed delivery, a difficult fix owing to the recognisably quick cool time of burgers.
It begs the head scratcher: with everything so bloody close around here, do we need a burger delivery service? Does a burger lend itself to delivery in this style? Shouldn’t it be eaten straight from the grill, rather than forty five minutes later? Hmmm. There are certainly enough post-production companies and other meeja establishments that will happily charge something like this back to the client, so there’s a market for it. But we’re not sure with this price point for what you get, it would become a regular lunch time go-to for someone like us, even though the delivery charge is included.
Still, the novelty of getting a phone call saying your burgers are in reception is Pretty Fucking Cool, and anyone delivering burgers into your hands is exciting.
It’s super early days for the #BRGR gang but there are bound to be changes. Much akin to the slick styling of the brand, the feedback form1 arrived in my inbox promptly a couple of days later. They are conscientious swots doing their homework, which hopefully should pay off.
- Rob.
- Oh, and if you’re reading this #BRGR, sorry I didn’t fill it out, I’ve just been, like, hella busy y’know, with like, stuff. ↩
