Burger Tour Part 9 – Lucky Chip at The Sebright Arms

Oh East London, I have been inside you too many times of late.  You make me feel uncomfortable, dirty and uncool.  You also remind me why I never want to be cool.  Who really has the time to go to all the clubz and take all the drugz?  I just want an early night in bed watching Jersey Shore.

Burger Tour is our special night out each month.  London is too expensive to do more than one nice thing each month and we choose meat and pals to celebrate being poor and happy.  This month we decided to go to the middle of an east end housing estate and check out the Lucky Chip Residency at The Sebright Arms, Hoxton.

Lucky Chip has a tidy little reputation as a stand alone business but as it’s a catering van and it’s -32 degrees, 90% of the time, we’ve avoided the venture thus far.  Finding out it was now in a pub with seats and a roof was all we needed to make our decision.

We arrived at 4.30 on a Saturday and The Sebright wasn’t open.   Strange but despite being a regular boozer it doesn’t open till 5 on a weekend and food isn’t served till 6….6.10 in our case.   A salvaged traffic light hangs on the wall.  Unnoticeable at first, this traffic light is the dictator in the room.  A burger ordering Hitler.  It’s not explained to you anywhere, there wasn’t even whispers, but you can’t order your food before the aubsolutist powers that be turn on the green light of hope and freedom.  Demz da rulez.  Noone will tell you the rulez (except for me) but demz definitely da rulez.  The whole thing gave me stress pains.

At 6.10 all of East London descended on the tills.  We were next to the bar and ended up 15^th in the queue.  All these East End kids must train for this sort of event, with 20 pop up restaurants a day, they need to be stealth.  I hate the whole system but I did like that they took our names and instead of giving us a shitty wooden spoon with a number on, they remembered us.  Imagine! It’s almost like they care about who they’re serving.  Like Starbucks but authentic right?

We didn’t wait too long really for our paper plates came holding the hunks of love.  We ordered the Royale x3 (not chicken like Burger King), Kevin Bacon and El Chappo.  We had 1 side of normal fries, one fries with cheese (that will be £2 extra please) and a popcorn chicken.

First thing to note is we couldn’t really tell the difference between the Royale and Kevin Bacon except price and maybe one had a seeded bun?  Both were good, juicy and well flavoured though.  A bit too salty but with a delicious sweet crunch on the bottom.  The bacon was sweet and the pickles crisp.  The El Chappo was moist and heated.  The spice was a little overpowering but still pleasing.  Buns were disappointing.  Simple and under a Tesco Finest standard.

The fries were good, salted well, crispy but fluffy, skins on.  Maybe some of the best we’ve had so far on tour.  The negative comes with the additional cheese on the second order of fries.  It was like catering cheddar you get at school.  Tasteless, pointless, profit boosting and chip ruining.  The popcorn chicken was by far the biggest disappointment.  £4.50 for 5 little bites of average chicken with a dip! Outfuckingrageous!  Needless to say anything outside of regular fries is not recommended.

Service was average, they remembered our name for food but everything seemed effortful outside of that.  The paper plates were a big hint of how little energy they wanted to exert in the clear up.  We’re indoors, let’s act like it, yeah?

In summary The Sebright Arms is a largely average pub and I think Lucky Chip is upping its takings 5000% at the moment from buzz alone.  The whole place was rammed with middle class annoying hipsters.  We were sat next to a guy that looked like Moby that insisted on snacking on his dates face before his food arrived and the wine served was corked and overpriced.  Not a great experience in total but if you wanted a nice snack and live in a 0.4 mile radius to the Sebright, it’s worth a visit.

Burger tour will continue the first weekend of every month until we are sick of burgers.

Burger Tour Part 8 – Patty and Bun

WE ARE BACKKK! It’s taken me a month and a bit to write this but rest assured 2013 is the continuation of our love affair with meat in carbs.  We burst back onto the scene by going to Patty and Bun.

I was gunna do this reallll quick to give you a sense of how we felt on this edition of Burger Tour, but I like to write it out.  Vent if you will… 

We got there at 11.45 (AM!) to join a ridiculous queue of hungry punters.  The masses have heard about the meat and when people want food in London, they will queue for hours (note: breakfast club). Opening at 12 they frog-marched people in, let a big family with a pram jump queue (note: unacceptable) and gave us menus before we’d taken our coats off.

We had maybe a minute before being asked for drinks, we said come back in 5, in another minute we were asked again and then again for drinks and burger choice.  By 12.05 we felt bullied and broken.  Like Bruce Bogtrotter being forced to ram that ton of chocolate cake down his chubby little neck.  For a company ‘passionate’ about comfort food, I’ve never felt more uncomfortable.  LET US HAVE A CONVERSATION MANN!!!

We ordered the Ari Gold (x2), Hot Chic and Smokey Robinson burgers.  We also had the wings on recommendation from our third waitress in 5 minutes, the one with fiery hair, wearing tiny denim hotpants over knitted leggings FYI.

The service was poor except for her.  We were served out of order to the line that came in and the chefs took their sweet little time.  All the beef burgers were served with the wings and fries.  The Chic burger came about 10 minutes later, dry, burnt and well below average.

The beef burgers were pretty good.  Juicy, smothered in American cheese (a cheese slice) and sweet beautiful bacon.  A bit too salty but good.  The wings were incredible.  Sweet, sticky, messy, joyful.  The meat fell off the bone and into our greedy little mouths.  The fries were super salty and Super Dry.  Almost as bad as the brand.  They’d been fried until the insides had shriveled away from the core potato wall.  A poor fryman was in charge of this batch and then tried to cover up the big ol’ mess with a bucket of rosemary salt.  Not cool bro.

Anyway ratings are:

Burger (meat only) 8.5/10

Chicken burger: 3/10

Bun: 8/10 

Toppings: 8/10 

Fries: 3/10

Wings: 10 /10

Service: 4/10 

Price : 6 / 10

The whole trip smacked of insincerity.  Hopping on the back of the burger trend wagon and getting a bit of buzz by being central.  The staff all bar the fiery girl were all super annoying and a bit incompetent (lets not talk about the issues paying, OK?).  Prices were pretty steep and the food was low.  A good core burger and nice wings save this from the bottom of the list.

NEXT TRIP: Lucky Chip residency at The Sebright Arms

Burger tour will continue the first weekend of every month until we are sick of burgers.

when kids give pep talks…its frickin’ awesome!

a tiny tree beard to brighten up your day.

by accordion apparel. click to buy here

The Kids Be Smokin’

bird watch

a recession dog named moose.

the many films of wes anderson - DKNG

all of the things by james gulliver hancock.

Burger Tour Part 7- Haché Burger

CHRISTMAS IS HEEERRRREEEE *runs around hugging everyone and stealing fruity cocktails from the free bar*

I have now had 5 Christmas dinners with another 3 meals scheduled.  I’ve even managed to sneak a steak and some lamb out of two of the restaurants because so many places have told me their turkey is not gluten free.  If anyone knows how plain turkey is wheat laden, I’d love to know.

As it’s Christmas, we needed to go on a Christmas Burger Tour to celebrate a year of meat eating and fine friendship.  This means that we added ‘Christmas’ as a prefix to the tour name and had to book a table because everywhere in London is bursting with tourists, cold people and those forced to have fun as ‘tis the season’.  Haché is probably the only burger restaurant that lets you book anywhere in London so that’s where we went.  Plus it had a good review from a pal.  Mainly the booking thing though.

Kelly and Dan arrived before us, which was like a gift only Santa himself could have delivered.  We settled at the back out of the way (my favourite place to be).  The staff were friendly and it was dimly lit which made it a little romantic on such a cold night.

The menu at Haché is pretty special, 30 burgers in total covering all the core meat categories including fish and duck.  You get a choice of bun (Ciabatta or Brioche) OR salad, which I had, loathingly.  The buns were freshly made and beautiful.  Sweet and soaked in meat juices.  My salad was actually good too.  I’m very fussy with salads and most places try to over impress.  I only like normal non-fluffy lettuce, cucumber, maybe 3 tomatoes and baby spinach.   They catered to my needs like an old friend.  They even chopped out the watery bits out of the cucumber. Perfection.

As purists, we all chose beef burgers.  Kelly had the Spanish, Dan the Catalan, Ricky the all day breakfast and me the Bavarian.  Now the others burgers looked lovely n all…Ricky got his beloved egg on top, Kelly had goats cheese and Dan chorizo blah blah blah but MINE WAS THE BEST THING EVER. Look at the picture!  Look at it! The Bavarian cheese was a thick layer that was so hefty it just looks like a bun lid.  It was burger fondue!  It was a Christmas miracle! I have officially rated my burger the best burger we’ve had so far in terms of content alone.  The meat was incredible.  Rare and juicy.  So well seasoned, they fell apart in the mouth.  Honest Burgers was great but this was godlike in taste and structure.

The only things letting down the experience were the side dishes.  The sides made me very sad.  The fries were ok, a bit McDonalds-like, unseasoned and floppy.  The onion rings were greasy and contained around 1% onion.  The sweet potato fries, which would usually make me giddy, disappointed.  They weren’t crisp enough and just really smushy in the mouth.  I don’t like my food smushy.  Unless its baked beans.  Baked beans HAVE to be smushy and thick.

Anyway ratings are:

Burger (meat only) 10/10

Bun: 8.9/10 from the others

Salad: 8/10

Toppings: 10/10 

Fries & Sides: 5.5/10

Service: 8/10 

Price : 8.5 / 10

There was the space to sit, talk, drink and be.  A bit too dark by the end of the night and you felt ready for a nap afterwards but all in all, a very successful seasonal meat eat.

We will be back in 2013 but until then,

HAVE AN AMAZING CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR BURGER FIENDS!