burgurr

Sit down, please. 

…

Sat? 

…

Okay, good. 

Something monumental has happened, and I didn’t want to risk you passing out. 

I made a burgurr. 

Not saying I "reviewed a burger”

I mean I physically made one, from nothing, and it is now on the menu at Hawksmoor. 

(with the help of Hawksmoor's Executive Head Chef, Matt Brown)

It’s now in every single one of their UK & Ireland restaurants!!

You can go and order it right now, today, and eat a burger that I brought to life with my own hands.

Given that this newsletter is, at its core, the ramblings of a man who has spent years shouting at cameras about what's wrong with everyone else's burgers, you can imagine this is a fairly enormous moment for me. 

It feels SO surreal seeing instagram stories/tiktoks/etc of everyone trying it out. 

A huge thank you to everyone who has booked a table and gotten their hands on it so far 🙏

I’m gonna talk a lot about it this week. 

We’ve also got a new giveaway that ties right into it, which I'll get to.

But first, we need to talk about what I've gone and done👇

Ladies and gents, let me give you the full story.

You'll know, if you've watched more or less any of my food content, that I do a thing. 

I say "burgurr." 

It started as a joke, it picked up a bit of momentum, and then (as these things tend to go) I just kept doing it, for years, long past the point of it making any sense. 

At some stage the good people at Hawksmoor, which you’ll know by now is one of my favorite places on earth (apparently I've been over 50 times), looked at all of this and thought: 

hang on, this man has never made a burger in his life but hands out his own golden burger award like he's royalty. But he's never once had to put his money where his mouth is.

So they challenged me to do exactly that. 

Get in the kitchen and build the perfect burger from scratch, or stop talking.

Now, the man overseeing this whole thing was Chef Matt Brown - the man who built the Big Matt, which for those who don't know was voted the best burger in the world in 2023 and has sat in the global top ten every single year since. 

This year he added the Royale with Cheese to the menu as well. This is a man who does not let a burger onto a Hawksmoor menu lightly, and he was standing over my shoulder the entire time, tasting, judging, offering the occasional side-eye when I did something he didn't agree with.

They could have made this easy. They could have built three burgers, sat me down, and let me point at my favourite. 

But we didn't do that. 

I built the whole thing from the ground up. Every single call was my own - the patty, the sauce, the cheese, the bun. When something wasn't right, we scrapped it and went again. We kept discarding what didn't work until the only thing left standing was a burger I'd have chosen for myself.

After many tense days in the kitchen… The Burgurr was born. 

Yes, that's what it's called. IYKYK.

It's a bacon double cheeseburger, and every part of it was a deliberate decision. 

All held together by a milk bun built to take the weight without collapsing halfway through.

You can have it as it comes, or order it as a full meal with beef dripping fries and peppercorn sauce on the side, which is how I have it myself.

The sauce was, by an absolute mile, the hardest part of the whole thing to get right. 

We made several different versions across a number of test days, and there was one we very nearly went with that was absolutely loaded with green peppercorn. It was dead punchy, had a fantastic kick to it, and a few people on the team really preferred it. But for me it was just a touch too niche. It would've been a different, more divisive burger. So we went another way.

And it's here that I have to confess something to you, the No Pickles faithful, the people who have followed me specifically because of a deeply held and very public position.

There are pickles in the sauce.

I know. I know. 

Take a breath. 

Calm it down. 

The whole premise of this newsletter - the name of the thing you are currently reading - is built on my long, proud, well-documented hatred of the pickle. And when it came to building my own burger sauce, the one thing I swore blind it would never contain, the single ingredient I have spent years actively campaigning against… went in. 

It just made the sauce better, and I had to accept that.

So if you've ever wanted to watch a man publicly betray his entire personal brand for the sake of a slightly better burger sauce, this is the burger for you 😂

The verdict, and I mean this even accounting for the fact that I obviously made it:

This is comfortably the best burger I've ever had.

Now, you're entirely within your rights to say "well, you would say that, you built it" and fair. But I've eaten a lot of burgers, I've been ruthlessly critical of nearly all of them, and I would not put my name on something I didn't believe in. Matt was impressed by the end, which, if you know Matt, is the equivalent of a standing ovation from anyone else.

You’ve probably already guessed what’s coming butttt

🥁🥁

For only the fourth time in the history of this newsletter (after Moi Soho, Osteria Angelina, and the Hawksmoor New York mac and cheese) I'm awarding a Stamp of Approval to myself. 

Yes, it's my own burger. Yes, I'm aware of how that looks. Yes, it contains the very thing this entire publication is named in opposition to. But the whole point of the stamp is that it's honest, and it would be dishonest of me to sit here, tell you it's the best burger I've ever had, and then withhold the stamp on a technicality.

🏆 STAMP OF APPROVAL #4: The Burgurr, Hawksmoor. Pickles and all

The Burgurr is available now at every Hawksmoor in the UK & Ireland. 

Go and try the thing I made, then reply and tell me I was right please 🙏

You can click the link here to check out Hawksmoor's version of this story.

Naturally, I couldn't let a week like this go by without giving something away.

5 winners. £100 to spend at Hawksmoor, each.

Enough for a lovely meal - and, should you choose to spend it this way, more than enough to go and put my burger to the test on somebody else's money.

Entering couldn't be simpler. 

You need to be subscribed to No Pickles, and you need to reply to this email with the subject line: “Burgurr”

Five winners pulled at random, announced in a coming issue.

The full terms and conditions for the voucher draw are at the very bottom of this email. Please have a read before you enter.

Quick word to last week's shirt winners: All shirts from giveaway have been delivered.  

Looks like some of you already have them in hand 👀

Lunch is, by a distance, the worst of the three meals. 

Breakfast is untouchable. Breakfast exists in its own perfect little world, answers to nobody, and is unreal.

Dinner is the main event, the one everything else builds towards. 

And then there's lunch, stuck awkwardly in the middle, not really sure what it wants to be.

Think about the timing. You're expected to have it around midday, but breakfast was often only at eight or nine, so you're barely hungry. And then what even is it? Are you having a Caesar salad? A wrap? A sad meal deal at your desk? There's no identity to it. 

I have never, in my entire life, walked away from a table and thought "now that was an unbelievable lunch." It doesn't happen. Any place that does a good lunch is, I guarantee you, doing a far better dinner.

I have to admit though, I had an hour to kill the other day at lunch and decided to take a solo trip to Hawksmoor (you’ll never guess what I ordered 😂) 

But in most cases, lunch is just a worse dinner served too early. 

Come and find me.

The best thing I've eaten recently: croquettes, of all things.

I've just got back from Ibiza, and it turns out that Ibiza is exceptional at croquettes. 

I had no idea this was a thing. 

I had the Iberico ham ones, which were some of the best I've ever eaten, and then a lobster croquette on top of that, and somewhere in the middle of it all I realised I just completely, unreservedly love a croquette. 

So that's my random recommendation to you this week. Find good croquettes and let them change your life a little.

TV recommendation I need your help with.

There's a show I keep seeing (I think it's relatively new, though it may have been knocking about for a bit) all about the Michelin inspectors going around keeping an eye on chefs chasing their first star. 

I haven't watched it yet, but I'm told the Top Jaw guy is one of the presenters, and I love seeing food creators on a stage that size. 

If you know the one I mean and can tell me what it's called, do let me know, because I want to get on it.

Last newsletter I asked where I should take a food series next, and also asked for your recommendations.

London first, then the rest of the UK and beyond, held to the same standard as that New York list you helped produce a couple of issues back. 

The results are in on both. 

First, the poll. Hundreds of you voted, and the message could not have been clearer:

🌍 Around the UK [38.5%]
🌍 Somewhere in Europe [21.5%]
🌏 South Korea [18.8%]
🌏 Japan [18.4%]
🌏 Vietnam [2.8%]

So the winner, by a clear distance, is: 

get out of London and go and eat your way around your own country!!!

Which is precisely what half the inbox has been telling me for a fortnight now. 

Message received loud and clear.

Someone put it a lil more bluntly than the rest: 

"How can you begin to understand foreign food when you can't even appreciate the food you have at home? Gotta start from the ground and work your way up, young freezy. Learn your culture first before branching out." 

So with the overwhelming, unmissable theme being that I need to leave London, it looks like every corner of the country is prepared to fight for its spot.

Middlesbrough is not letting the Parmo thing go, and I respect it enormously. Kayleigh from Middlesbrough wrote in shock that the rest of the country doesn't know what a Parmo is, and pointed me to an award-winning one at Borge Ristorante in Stockton, with strict instructions on the garlic sauce. She is not alone. The North East has effectively formed a Parmo lobbying group and I am now its primary target.

The Cornwall crowd made maybe the best point of the week, and it's aimed straight at me: "Cal, cal, cal…  a man who's made a burger in Hawksmoor but hasn't tried one of the national burger finalists in Cornwall?" Herd Burger, Boo Koos in Falmouth with a burger challenge apparently too big for a camera to frame, Wingshed, Rems Caff. I've made a burger for a national steakhouse and I've never eaten at a national burger finalist two hundred miles down the road. That's a hole in my CV and I intend to fix it.

Lucy from Aberfeldy, stuck in rural Scotland and overwhelmed by choice whenever she reaches a city said "Help me Cal!!!" 

You’re in the right place Lucy, that’s what this newsletter is for! 

Birmingham wrote in braced for me to dismiss it and pleading for an open mind (I'm keeping one). 

I saw a bunch of recommendations for Bristol, Bath, Newcastle's Grainger Market, the Midlands and the Black Country for Indian and Nepalese food, Norfolk, Dorset's Lazy Fox serving cocktails out of an IV drip and a bathtub (wtf) and a heartfelt case for pies as some of the best English food going, from someone who begged me to "get out the big cities."

Some more special mentions👇 

Lillymae, who wants a full city-vs-city cuisine battle (Manny vs London for best steak, which sounds like a great shout). 

The reader who has built an entire Notion page to track my recommendations (cuisine, location, address, what to order, whether they've been, and a column for the No Pickles Stamp of Approval. That's the most organised thing anyone has ever done off the back of this newsletter and I'm honoured ❤️

Had someone who typed "Chester" 165 times in a row… guessing that’s a strong vote for Chester? 

A New Zealander informed me they have the best Angus beef in the world and I have to try a bakery meat pie. I love national pride. Respect.

Victoria from Houston recommended Piola. An Italian spot she rates so highly she'll die on the hill (with the honest caveat that the owners have changed since her last visit)

Sashaa, on Toronto (Pizzeria Badiali, Bao House) and Vancouver (Big Way Hot Pot) "guaranteed clip farming," apparently

Tamsyn, with a full Sydney list: Sake, del Punto, Sushi Hub, Georges Pizza

Orson with a Malaysian/Singaporean gem, Singapulah, right by Chinatown

and lastly Jen writing in about Café Marseille in Northampton, "gorgeous little place with bangin food!!!"

Now the promise still stands, and I'm putting it in writing again so you can hold me to it: 

I'm going to take one of your recommendations and go review it on camera

It's looking increasingly likely that the whole series is heading out of London and around the country.

As always, thank you to every single one of you that writes in with these recommendations. 

I appreciate every single one of you whether it’s featured in the newsletter or not. 

I love that we’re building up such a huge database of the best spots (maybe I need to create like an ultimate global guide at some point 👀) 

Keep these coming!

Given everything that's happened this week, there's only one question I can really ask isn’t there.

If you've been to Hawksmoor and tried it, I want to know where it lands for you against the greats. 

Best answers as always feature in the next newsletter!

(especially if you vote Best burger I've had, full stop 😂)

That's Issue 07, which has been, by some margin, the most surreal one to write.

If you go and try The Burgurr, please use the poll to tell me what you think!

And if you want one of the five Hawksmoor vouchers, follow the instructions and you're in.

Cal 🥒

No Pickles · Issue 07 · by the numbers

Stamps awarded to date: 4 (Moi Soho, Osteria Angelina, Hawksmoor NY mac, and now The Burgurr)

Burgers I have personally built from scratch and put on a national menu: 1 

Core personal values betrayed in the making of said burger: 1 

Hawksmoor vouchers up for grabs: 5 (£100 each)

Shirt winners from last week now proudly kitted out: 10

Croquettes that changed my life in Ibiza: several

People from the North East holding me accountable for Parmo awareness: rising