Burger blues (pt. 1)

Now, I am not the sort of person who hankers after 'home comforts' all the time. I am quite prepared to 'go Chinese' (despite the notorious limitations of the cuisine!) for weeks together at a stretch. And when I do occasionally treat myself to something a little more upmarket, it's more likely to be something more richly flavoured, like Indian or Thai food.... or, once in a blue moon, a proper restaurant like Alameda. However, the simplicity of the classic burger is a thing of beauty, and I do from time to time find myself pining for something like..... well, not quite like this meaty monstrosity below (deprivation warps the mind, you know), but a really good burger.

Actually, the template of burger perfection in my mind (never having been to the gleefully over-the-top Heart Attack Grill in the suburbs of Phoenix, which is home to the towering stack of carnivore delight above) is probably the burgers of Pepper's, a little takeaway joint in North Oxford (just past the Phoenix arts cinema, which was a second home to me throughout my student days and in a subsequent period living and working in the city). On my last trip back 16 months ago, I was bitterly upset to discover that the place had suddenly closed, after - I think - more than 25 years of doing business. Burgers, fries, buns, and range of sauces available were all hard to fault - and they were cooked to order, right in front of you, on a grill behind the counter. I have many (not always entirely pleasant) memories of the 'White Shark' - an extra-strong chilli sauce which The Bookseller and I would regularly order as a kind of (foolish, self-destructive!) macho competition between ourselves. Whereas he could often outdo me in smothering a doner kebab with 'special' sauce from one of his favourite 'bab vans, encounters with The Shark usually favoured me. He just wasn't so practised with it. The problem with it was that you were never quite sure what you were going to get: they didn't exactly have a set recipe for it, I don't think; they just seemed to mix it up ad hoc, by adding a random heap of chilli powder to their regular (not exactly wimpy) chilli sauce. It tended to be a brownish colour, rather than red (rather like the colour of dried blood, in fact, now that I come to think of it); and, in its hottest incarnations, it had a thick and gritty texture. I recall one occasion when The Bookseller - despite extensive precautionary anaesthesia - found himself quite defeated by The Shark, and had to scrape the sauce off his burger after just a few bites. He then proceeded to drip blobs of the fiery-hot brown goo experimentally on to concrete paving stones - "to see if it will eat holes in them; you know, like the Alien's blood".

Other glimpses of "burger heaven" in my life have been Fat Burger in LA and Five Guys in DC (in fact, I have come to know and love Five Guys especially over the last decade and a bit because they have a branch in Alexandria, just off King St, barely two blocks from where the old university friend I usually stay with lives; well, he used to live there; at least he's still in Old Town, and within a reasonable walk of FG). Five Guys perhaps suffers from a slightly over-complicated ordering system (you have to pick all your fixins individually, and there's a huge selection), but it's very reasonably priced; and I love the choice of regular or chilli fries; oh, and the sack of free peanuts for you to amuse yourself with while you wait for your order to be made up. Fat Burger I don't remember too much about now, except that the burgers were good, and HUGE. And except that it figured in one of David Letterman's humorous 'lists' - of reasons why it was good to live in LA. And except that in the one I visited (not too far from Venice Beach; and within a few hours of my very first arrival in the States, some 15 years ago) none of the staff and very few of the customers spoke anything but Spanish.

But I digress...... The point of this post was supposed to be to review the burger scene in Beijing (briefly). Expats here have long complained that there is nowhere in the city to get a really good burger (well, nowhere apart from TGI Friday's and the Hard Rock Café, which are not the kind of places I would ever go in..... and the distant 'Little America' of Shunyi township). However, in the last year - indeed, just in the last few months - there has been a veritable explosion of new burger options in the city. I still haven't tried most of these new places. And I'm probably never going to try most of them. There are one or two places getting into a how-much-money-can-we-waste-on-something-as-simple-as-a-burger pissing competion: wagyu steak and foie gras garnish? Oh, please!! I am not ever going to spend that kind of money (200 or 300 kuai!) on a burger, even if my lottery numbers do come up. This is, alas, part of the progressive gentrification - the Shanghai-ification - that has been assaulting our fair city in recent months (something I complained of just the other day). I think this trend can be resisted and repulsed, if we all stand together against it. Unfortunately, I fear, far too many people are prepared to say, "Hey, you know, I'm so desperate for a burger, I'd pay almost anything for one", or "Well, 70 kuai isn't so unreasonable for a burger; I guess I can afford that."

The vanguard of the Nanluoguxiang bar street (it's been there 7 years now, putting it at least 4 years ahead of the trend!) was the Pass-By Bar. In its early days it used to have a burger - a rather good burger, at that - on its menu. I mean, it wasn't anything great, but at that time it was the only place in the city I knew where you could get one at all. In those days it was a pretty low-rent, unpretentious kind of joint - catering mostly to backpackers, indigent English teachers, and the impoverished boho type of expat that lives around the Ju'er Hutong. Susan, the owner, tried to tell me that nobody ever ordered the burger; but that was highly dubious - I ordered it myself quite regularly, and most of the friends I introduced to the place had tried it and enjoyed it on their first visits (as I said, it was just about the only place you could get a burger back then - at least, in our neighbourhood - and so it was an obvious first choice on the menu for expats, especially Americans, who were starting to feel pangs of homesickness). No, cutting their burger from the menu was a statement of intent, the beginning of a push for a more upscale clientele: No Riff-Raff. In commercial terms, it seems to have worked out for them: their original siheyuan café has expanded, and is now regularly packed (though mostly now with Chinese yuppies, rather than the down-at-heel expats the place used to attract); and they've been able to open a more ambitious 'restaurant' branch of the business a few doors down. Good luck to them. However, I do rather miss the Pass-By of old - quaint, rarely crowded, 'my secret'. And I miss being able to get a burger in the 'hood.

It is curious, is it not, that the early wave of gentrification in our city would seem to have involved the eradication of the burger, while the second phase - the Let's catch up to Shanghai phase - involves its reintroduction at ridiculously high prices.

Enough, then, of the historical background. Let's review the burger options in Beijing today.

Well, OK, no, let's not. I've rather run out of steam for now. And I've made myself feel hungry by talking about all of this. Supper calls.

To be continued........