Burger Monday at Hawksmoor

Sometimes emailed invitations are too tempting to turn down. The offer of a Hawksmoor burger and a taste of the new sandwiches they’ll be offering at their soon-to-be-opened Covent Garden branch was just such an email.

My regular reader will know that [link2post id=”102″]Hawksmoor burgers are of mind-altering quality[/link2post]. Just look at this one:

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Looks marvellous, eh? For a change I didn’t have the Stichelton cheese but Ogleshield and you can see the rasher of Ginger Pig bacon ‘artfully’ draped over it. The burger itself was incredibly meaty with a slight gamey character as a result of being made from properly aged meat. The addition of bone marrow certainly added richness and increased its depth of character. Apparently it took the Hawksmoor team weeks of experimentation to find the best blend of different cuts of meat to make the patty; well done boys and girls for doing so and thank you for working so hard at it. An excitingly, trouser-bulgingly brilliant burger and that, once again, had me moaning and sighing with gustatory pleasure. It was so tasty that I didn’t even resent them diluting its brilliance with a slice of tomato nor [link2post id=”1531″]raising my risk of getting cancer by adding some lettuce[/link2post]. Vegetables are generally pointless and vapid, don’t you agree?

The chap organising the event gave us specific facets of the burger to comment on: mine was the bun. I found it to have a good flavour and it retained its cohesive character even when it got soake by the tasty juices from the burger. A top example of the burger bun.

Daniel was tasked with an analysis of the outside texture of the burger. It was nothing remarkable being neither charred nor under-cooked. Strangely, given the texture of this outer layer it could easily remind one of a McDonald’s burger, but take a bite and its flavour was such that even the hard of thinking and, indeed, scum of the most disgustingly ignorant variety could not fail to grin and fall in love with it. Duty discharged.

We then moved on to the sandwiches. Firstly came some hot and cold lobster rolls:

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I first had lobster rolls at the Pearl Oyster Bar In New York. It pains me to relate that, whilst Hawksmoor thrashes New York in the burger stakes (they just don’t use the very best cuts of meat for burger creation and do not seem to know how to cook them properly), they are sadly trailing when it comes to lobster rolls. Certainly they were good enough to make me grin with jollity, but I missed the butter-fried brioche rolls of the Pearl Oyster Bar and the truly epic quantities of lobster they were stuffed with. Of the two the filling of the cold lobster rolls struck me as being best and the buns of the hot ones seemed tastiest.

The final offering for this hedonistic lunch were some pork belly and coleslaw rolls:

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The pork belly in them was very similar in flavour and texture to Hawksmoor’s Tamworth belly ribs, and since they are some of the most throbbingly brilliant pieces of pork I have eaten this is most definitely a Good Thing. Indeed, as I was about to take my second bite of the sandwich I thought “bugger this bread contrivance” and just ate the sex-tastic bits of pork from the middle. I was right to do so, they were downright delicious. Bits of meat, that is what we all need; they are just so yummy and manifestly good for us that they should only be turned down when cooked in the less savoury variety of institutional kitchen[1. Loony bin kitchens immediately spring to mind.]

Once again, Hawksmoor delivered winning food with extreme competence and class. It is clearly one of the destination restaurants in London and cannot be beaten (outside of Casa Nicolas in Tolosa, at least) if you want pulsatingly good bits of meat. I’m off there again with the Oxford wine crew in a couple of weeks and I fully expect it to wow them with its pulsing bits of animal action. We shall do well, oh yes, we shall do well.

Contact details: Hawksmoor, 157 Commercial Street, E1 6BJ Telephone: 020 7247 7392