Happy Cheesemas: Getting Festive at Byron Burger

We wish you a merry Cheesemas, and a cheesy New Year. This is pretty much the tune on Byron's carol sheets this Christmas as they have marked the festive season with that most Christmassy of specials - a, erm, bacon double cheeseburger. 

But to be fair, this is a pretty souped up bacon double cheeseburger, with honey and mustard sauce, freddar (whatever that is), chipotle mayo, pickle and various other garnishes that I really can't be bothered to list. Kudos to Byron, too, for doing something different - pretty much every competitor's special involves cranberry sauce and trimmings you'd usually find on the dinner plate on the 25th December, and let's face it, most people would usually be uneasy about having sprouts on their burger at all other times of year!

Nevertheless, a discussion about burgers with a colleague a couple of weeks back has seen us trekking to Byron to share a Cheesemas. To be fair I could probably eat one on my own (just) but with the diet I am reluctant to consume that many calories in one go and with my companion suggesting she would happily devour half of one I consented (so long as a trip to the pub afterwards was included of course). 

I'm not going to review Byron as a restaurant right now, I suspect I'll be there again soon as it's nice and convenient so I'll do it then and concentrate on the burger for this one. We ordered the titular Father Cheesemas and a portion of hand cut chips and eagerly anticipated the arrival of the burger. 
When it came, it looked strangely small and lonely on its plate - it clearly wasn't small, but the size of the plate did it no favours. I cut it in half so it could be easily shared.

It was nice and pink in the middle and as you could see the innards perfectly, looked pretty damn appetising. It's not as tall as you'd think either and quite easily fit inside my mouth. My first impressions were that it was a nice burger, the freddar is like cheese squared and had a wonderful oozy texture (although there wasn't enough of it) and the meat was nice and tender although somewhat underseasoned. The bacon added a nice crunch to the affair although I actually prefer my bacon to be meaty rather than crispy, and the pickled gherkin gave little flashes of sweet and sour juiciness. I had one main problem and that was the sauce. A few weeks ago I had a Lucky Chip burger and found the sauce to be overwhelmingly salty, well this was the opposite - it was very, very sweet. I could taste the mustard in it but it didn't offer much bite or counter the honey. The chipotle element of the other sauce used was completely obliterated by the sweetness and I could hardly taste it. I happily finished it, but Byron have better, more balanced burgers in their range.

So overall I liked it, but it suffered from an abundance of one element and a lack of seasoning in the patty. It could have been great, instead it's just nice.

Byron Father Cheesemas: 7.25


The Details:
Byron Burger
Various locations areound London

https://www.byronhamburgers.com/

Burger Reviewed: Father Cheesemas, £12.95

The Lager Conundrum

Lager. I can't think of any beer which divides opinion so much in the beer world. Most of the world drinks it yet it has a terrible press, largely to do with the popular mass-market lagers - the likes of Carling, Bud, Heineken, Stella, Fosters, Kronenbourg, Cobra and Skol are loved by the majority yet slated in the beer press. The fact remains that "big beer" manufacture their big sellers to high levels of consistency while keeping costs low which inevitably means lower quality ingredients and, lets face it, a pretty bland tasting product. This consistent blandness doesn't offend most palates yet and, even better for the lager lover, ensures that their favourite tipple never tastes any different (unless the landlord is lazy when it comes to beer line cleaning of course). It also means that most lagers are interchangeable so the average drinker has an alternative in the event of his usual choice being unavailable.
The craft revolution, however, has brought us a new type of lager, made from top drawer ingredients in the true spirit of the craft beer ethos - breweries like Camden, Redwell and 40ft are largely devoted to producing it and in the cities, it's beginning to drag consumers away from "big beer". The beer press are almost evangelical about it. 

As for myself, well I seriously dislike lager. I never really liked it when I was drinking the mass market stuff and only drank it because it was what everyone got when they bought a round (there was no asking what you wanted to drink in those days unless you were female, the person buying a round just got six pints of bloody Fosters). When I discovered cask beer, I rejoiced in being able to drink proper beer that didn't leave me bloated and with definitive bold flavours. I have tried the craft lager efforts and the only one I have liked out of over a hundred is Camden IHL and that's because it tastes like a very fizzy IPA. Who needs lager?

Yet the beer writers want to force it down my throat. I don't like beer if I don't like (craft) lager they say. My monthly random beer box I get (so I can sample things I wouldn't normally see in a bottle shop) was stuffed to the brim with it a couple of months ago. When I mentioned my distaste to a random in passing conversation at the bar of the Craft Beer Company in Islington a few weeks ago he looked at me as if I was mad and told me I was prejudiced against it. What? Why am I not allowed to dislike something? Why is it that every time someone says that they don't like any lagers, people call them beer Nazis? Why must I have lager forced down my throat by the crafterati? Can't people just accept that this is my personal taste? This is as bad as the people that criticise lager drinkers for not drinking other beers, as bad as the reams of intolerant CAMRA members who declare anything that isn't from a cask as evil and as bad as the big beer drinkers that sneer at people who drink real ale.

Beer taste is subjective. Let's all live and let live, eh?

One-Six-Seven

I have never liked buses. When I was a lazy teenager I used to use the 81/82 Hutton Circular to get to the local town and back again and I could regularly be heard whining about how £2.90 was not a reasonable price for a six mile round trip on an uncomfortable and overcrowded old minibus which usually smelt of who-knows-what and had suspension like a trampoline. Then I learned to drive and I didn't have to worry about buses any more outside the occasional bus I'd catch in London when the tube drivers were on strike. Bliss.

Fast forward a decade and a half or so and I'm waiting outside KFC in Ilford for the bus home. Since I moved within the travelcard zones bus travel has again become a way of life when getting around, the roads aren't too bad but buses are cheap (I can catch as many of them as I like for £4.40 per day), quite comfortable, plentiful and regular. I do, however, wonder how some of them make any money given the amount of empty buses that thunder past while I'm on a wander, especially in the evenings. But nothing compares to the emptiness that is the 167.

The 167 is the bus I need to get me home from nights out in Romford. Despite now living in Loughton, I am loathe to give up my social life and while a lot of that involves travel to and from London (not a problem), I still find myself in Romford on a regular basis. Despite being only seven miles from my home, there is no direct public transport route there so the journey home involves the 86 bus to Ilford followed by the 167 to Loughton. The first bus is relatively well used, with a smattering of people spread across both decks, however once you change to the 167 it's like you've transported yourself into a parallel dimension where using the bus is something to be ashamed of. It starts at Ilford yet is always late - the other day it was 28 minutes late and two turned up at once, quite a feat for a bus which has half hourly timetable intervals - and no-one travels on it. I have frequented it several times in the past six weeks yet I can count the fellow passengers that have shared part of the journey with me on one hand and one of those got on it by mistake and was off again at the next stop. It's like my own personal bus to Loughton station. 

Of course when your bus is as empty as this all the time - and I have caught it at varying times of the day - one worries just how long TfL will keep running it. Most bus companies elsewhere in the country would have given it the chop already, there was a couple of months back in the later part of last decade where the aforementioned 81 and 82 service was cut, and that had much higher patronage than the 167 does (it was axed because "too many pensioners" made FirstBus' profits for the route slim). I can only guess that the other, more busy routes around the area like the number 20 keep it afloat. So next time you're on a packed bus into the city, take a moment to celebrate how that route allows people like me a decent bus service despite living way out in the boondocks. 

The Hops and Glory

A couple of years ago, fed up with the limited beer selection in the nearby Lord Clyde, I came across a small, unassuming corner pub on Essex Road. It had a curious maroon front and inside the dark interior twelve keg fonts sparkled in the dim light. A scattering of furniture adorned the floor, with largely mismatched sofas and low tables. A pile of board games sat in the corner on top of an old piano, free to use for all that wanted to play Scrabble with a few letters missing or maybe Trivial Pursuit with question cards from 1990. 
This was the Hops and Glory, and it was the first proper 'craft beer' pub that I'd ever stepped foot in (BrewDog aside).

I'd discovered a love for beer back in the mid-2000s. Of course, my later teenage years were driven by cheap lager and Stella-induced headaches but by my twenties, dislike of the basic taste of lager I had written off beer as "not for me" and moved over to cider - the hangovers were worse but the product didn't taste horrible. I was converted back to the hoppy side by the combination of a lack of cider in the pub I was frequenting and a cask of St. Austell's Proper Job, and I eventually became a bit of a cask beer Nazi, refusing steadfastly to drink anything that didn't come from a hand pump. 

On that first visit, I stuck to the three handpumps although the selection wasn't exactly inspiring. I became a regular and with the advice of Graham (the regular bar keep on Saturdays) and the landlord, Durham, I was weaned onto the keg selection and my appreciation for quality 'craft' keg was born. For two years I kept coming back but the beer selection started to get a bit samey and I found that the area by Angel station was a much better bet for craft. The Hops became another one of those "pubs where I used to drink" but I will always be grateful to the staff there for opening up my beer horizons even more than CAMRA and cask ale did.

The Hops shut for a couple of months after the summer for a refurb and to add a bigger kitchen so when they announced a "soft" opening I headed down to see what Durham had done with the place.
Inside, the main decor was pretty much as it had been before but the new kitchen protruded out into the pub, taking up the area where once there had been some comfy sofas. The tables and chairs were all new, and a huge long table sat in the middle of the pub, catering for several drinkers and diners at once. Although it looked smart, my main concern was that the pub now looked and felt a bit like a restaurant, despite Durham's assurances to the contrary when I questioned him about it. 

Still, the half of Beavertown's Neck Oil was spot on but the star of the show was the food. We shared two dishes, selecting the bavette steak and the celeriac. The steak was beautifully cooked and flavoursome and sat on a most wonderful aioli which was so nice I forgot I was on a diet and promptly ate it all. It came with a portion of duck fat chips which were nice and crispy on the outside yet fluffy and light once you bit them. I'm not one for ordering veggie dishes but the celeriac was just as good, how you get that flavour from a bit of celeriac I'll never know. It came with roasted parsnips (good, but you can't really do much with a parsnip. It'll always just taste of parsnip) and a nut mayo which lifted the whole dish. I could have easily eaten both dishes and even at full price they'd have been good value for money.

We left after dinner but I'll definitely be back - I'd like to see what the beer selection is normally as on our visit they only had a couple of beers available and the bottle fridges were still absent, and I want to try some more things on their menu. If the landlord can balance the pub operation so drinkers are accommodated as well as diners then it'll be one of the best venues in the area but hey, if it just becomes a restaurant which serves nice beer then Islington may have lost a pub, but it's gained an excellent eating establishment.

The Details:
The Hops and Glory
382 Essex Road
Islington
London
N1 3PF
http://www.hopsandglory.co.uk/

Resignation

So, for the second year in a row, I'm on notice from my employer and will be starting a new job in January - a new job with my old employer no less. They say you should never go back, but sometimes you take a chance at something different and find out it's just not for you. It's not that I didn't like this job - it's fine, and largely what I was doing at Bond anyway (just based in an office rather than on a client site) but I just don't like being stuck in an office every day. I'd rather be out "in the field", meeting clients, building a rapport with them and exploring the country a bit in the meantime. 

So instead of the walk from Loughton to Woodford on the first working day of the New Year, it'll be a drive to Witham. I'm quite looking forward to it, and I wonder where they'll send me first...!