Shake it Up Baby: Shake Shack Flatters to Decieve

Sometimes, you just need a burger. I encountered one of these moments while I was negotiating the crowded and depressing expanse otherwise known as Westfield Stratford City. Westfield is a place of lost souls and if I spend more than a few minutes within its yawning bowels I get all out of sorts so a burger was required to set me straight before I headed home. Westfield isn't great for burger joints, there being just two: GBK and recent American chain arrival Shake Shack. Although I have not exactly heard heaps of praise for Shake Shack before, some blogs rate them so I elected to see for myself whether they can fry up a good patty.

The venue itself was quite big, but strangely empty considering it was half past twelve on a Saturday afternoon, there being a smattering of people waiting on the large expanse of bench seating to the left of the counter. The menu wasn't overloaded with choices but sometimes that's a good thing if they can do the simple things right. I don't trust Americans with bacon so I went for the ShackMeister, which was a cheeseburger with "shack sauce" and crispy beer-cooked shallots.

I was sent to the seating area to wait, and they gave me one of those curious things that vibrates when your order is ready - that was surely a bit of overkill considering there were about nine people in the restaurant and half of them were already eating! Nevertheless it gave me a chance to google some reviews of them online and before I knew it the little plastic thing was buzzing and the burger arrived.

For the second time in two days I was suprised by a burger's size, but unlike the previous day's Dirty Burger, this one did not make up for it in thickness, I thought the patty to be rather sadly small. The bun wasn't particularly special either, just a normal sesame seed affair, and rather dry to boot. I don't mind a seeded bun (in fact I quite like them - they certainly makes a change from the proliferation of brioche buns we get these days) but you need a decent burger to be contained within it... and this wasn't. I might have suspected that it would not be great when the chap behind the counter didn't ask me how I would like it cooked but it was the most well-cooked burger I've had from a dedicated burger joint. No juiciness and melt-in-the-mouth texture here, just fairly dry and a little tough, and coupled with the under-par and dry bun it didn't exactly make my mouth sing with pleasure. The cheese was plasticky, like those supermarket cheese slices often seen at barbecues,and the shallots were a bit stringy and I certainly couldn't taste any of the beer that they had allegedly been cooked in. The 'shack sauce' was either used so sparingly it was hardly there or it was just plain tasteless. Either way I was totally unimpressed and it was more of a waste of money than the £20 effort from Burger and Lobster. At least that one was nice.

I've eaten a lot of burgers in my time and despite my criticism above this was nowhere near the worst, the problem I have is that when you spend over six pounds on a burger alone it should be pretty damn good, and not just barely a step above a McDonald's cheeseburger. If you gave me the option of a Big Mac, a Whopper or a ShackMeister then I would choose one of the two big chain burgers and that pretty much says it all. Maybe Shake Shack are better at milkshakes....





Shake Shack ShackMeister: 4
The Details:

Shake Shack
124-125 The Street
Westfield Stratford City
London
E20 1EN



Burger reviewed: ShackMeister, £6.50

HVNP Burger Rankings (May 14th) :

1. Bleecker Street | Black | 9.25
2. Patty & Bun | Ari Gold | 9.00
3. Honest Burger | Bacon Tribute 8.50

4. Dirty Burger | Dirty Bacon 8.25

5. Lucky Chip | Royale with Cheese | 7.5

=6. Byron | Chilli 7.25

=6. Byron | Father Cheesemas | 7.25

=6. GBK | The Don | 7.25

9. Burger & Lobster | Cheeseburger 6.50
10. Shake Shack | ShackMeister 4.00

Some Pub I Used to Know: The Castle

It's a conundrum. Looking back through previous posts, HvNP almost looks like a review blog and that was never my original intention so I've decided to talk about some other stuff to break things up a bit. One of my passions, as everyone who knows me will attest to, is pubs.

I've been thinking a lot about places I used to go when I was a young whipper-snapper growing up in South-West Essex and it occurred to me that a lot of the pubs seemed to have disappeared - part of the general malaise in the pub industry at the moment. Maybe that's a post all in itself but for now, here is a misty-eyed recollection of the Castle, a proper pub now sadly lost to a terrible night club.

I grew up in a small, sleepy commuter town just to the north-east of Romford. Brentwood was once named (by Richard Littlejohn, if you remember him) as the most boring place in the country and at the time I could quite believe him - there were no decent shops, no cinema or recreation facilities, no proper sports clubs and nowhere nice to eat. There were, however, plenty of pubs - If I walked to town, there was the Hutton Junction down by Shenfield station, up to the Eagle and Child and Green Dragon at Tabor's Corner, to the pubs of the high street - the Good Intent (now a Cafe Uno), White Horse (now a KFC), White Hart (now the Sugar Hut and a future post), Hobgoblin (now a Prezzo), Litten Tree (now called the Merchant), the Swan and the Charles Napier (now an access road). Round the back streets we also had the Gardiner's Arms and the Victoria Arms. A wealth of choice then, but although many a Saturday night was spent in the White Hart, my pub of choice was one I have not mentioned yet. It was opposite Sainsbury's, it had five pool tables and it had a landlord that would rather tell you to fuck off than serve you.
It was called The Castle.

The Castle used to be a biker pub but by the time I became a regular it had fallen into decline somewhat. I started drinking there because it was over the road from my work, and I have vague memories of going there before the pool tables came when they had a stage and regular live entertainment was held - I saw Al Murray play the pub landlord there before he became huge (was that 1998 or something?). When the pub began to go into decline they cleared the tables out of the large back area and replaced them with five pool tables, two on the old stage and three in the area in front of them. There were a couple of tables in the front of the pub by the windows and a beer "garden" out the back which was totally paved over and was where the ne'er do wells went to smoke weed. It was tatty, old and the toilets smelled horrible but it was mine. Mick - the landlord - was rude and swore at us all the time but we didn't care. The regulars were rough and ready and butted in on your pool games claiming winner stays on but we didn't care (much). The beer lines never seemed to be particularly clean but we didn't care. The jukebox hadn't been updated for ages but we didn't care. It was ours, a smoky cave which could have come right out of the 1980s just plonked on the side of one the main arteries through town. We didn't go there because it had nice beer, we went there for the atmosphere, the banter with the locals and the landlord, to have a good time and a game of pool, to get away from the realities of the world outside. 

By 2005 we had moved on, now drinking mostly in Romford. Mick had gone, replaced by a long line of landlords who desperately tried to get the pub above its reputation, to stimulate business, to make a go of it. But they couldn't, and although I still visited fairly regularly the pub got emptier and emptier.

Then they took it away, in March 2007, on the same day they ran Freak (the rock night in Romford we had attended on-and-off since the late 90s) for the last time. On the last ever day of opening there were only a handful of people in the pub. I took an 8-ball from the back table, and at 10 we traipsed off having paid our respects and headed to Freak to pay our respects there as well, leaving behind only memories - many happy, drunken memories.

It's a club now, called Eclipse, and even that is failing. I've never been in there, and I don't really want to either, but every time I drive past it (and that's a lot) I think back, and have a smirk at something from an era I can genuinely call "the good old days"

What's in a Name? Living up to the Moniker of Dirty Burger

Well, it's been awhile. After changing job, things got a little busy and while I have had things to talk about, I just haven't got around to posting anything new on here, and the longer I left it, the more I pushed HvNP to the back of my mind. But with the onset of June and summer, I think it's time to jump back on the blog wagon and to kick things back off, I've got my favourite kind of post: a burger review.

It was one of those nights where I had gone out randomly for a "few" beers, and anticipating a bit of a drink up, a burger was needed. Being in Shoreditch, the only choice was the intriguingly named Dirty Burger, a pop-up gone permanent just up the road from BrewDog. The venue wasn't exactly big and my immediate comparison would be to Patty & Bun at Liverpool Street, although in Dirty Burger the decor was wood-trimmed like a log shack and there was a large central table that was absent in P&B, the latter having seating only at the edges. Nevertheless, there was room to sit so I ordered a Dirty Bacon and sat down to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Now, I'm used to waiting at burger joints in London, the burger joints I frequent are not really fast food despite the image burgers have garnered. But we waited for over twenty minutes for our food despite there not being many people around and several people arrived after us getting their food before. I think they forgot about our order but the mumbling apology didn't endear the place to me I must say.

Nevertheless, I always aim to concentrate on the qualities of the burger rather than the overall experience so I won't dwell too much on the tardiness of the service. Eventually the burgers did turn up and we tucked in with gusto.
My first impression was that it was a bit small - I can't remember how many ounces in weight the burger was supposed to be but I was rueing not taking the 'extra patty' option. The patty was well seasoned and tender, having that melt in the mouth quality that I rate so highly in a burger. It was also quite juicy, which many people might baulk at yet I find quite satisfying - and also apt considering the name of the venue. The sauce was interesting - a bit like burger sauce but with a lot less mayo - and was an effective accompaniment, highlighting the qualities of the meat without riding roughshod over it. A quick word, too, for the bacon, which was nice and meaty. Burger bacon should not be of the thin and crispy variety in my opinion (Yes, yes I know I say that all the time; and I'm going to continue saying it until people listen!). Overall, it was a very tasty burger and DB let the meat be the star rather than buckle under the temptation to overload it with extra flavours. Keep it simple, and it works. It's not a world beater, but it's bloody nice. 

Dirty Burger Dirty Bacon: 8.25

The Details:

Dirty Burger
13 Bethnal Green Road
London
E1 6LA

www.eatdirtyburger.com

Burger reviewed: Dirty Bacon, £8

HVNP Burger Rankings (May 13th) :

1. Bleecker Street | Black | 9.25
2. Patty & Bun | Ari Gold | 9.00
3. Honest Burger | Bacon Tribute 8.50

4. Dirty Burger | Dirty Bacon 8.25

5. Lucky Chip | Royale with Cheese | 7.5

=6. Byron | Chilli 7.25

=6. Byron | Father Cheesemas | 7.25

=6. GBK | The Don | 7.25

8. Burger & Lobster | Cheeseburger 6.50