Unsmashed Hits
Jupiter, Buster’s, Dove, and the limited limitlessness of London’s burger multiverse
It may well be that the people most desensitised to the intimate presence of gawping iPhones are London’s smash burger chefs. At Junk, on Old Compton Street, camera lenses descend ravenously onto draped slices of American cheese and regiments of sauce-splatted buns; Bun & Sum’s social media output is the looped smoosh and sizzle of a nitrile-gloved hand tamping a patty into a flat-top for eternity. One of the abiding images of my first and last trip to Supernova burger is of grill cooks so accustomed to people holding smartphones centimetres from their faces that they brought to mind baseball-capped animals in a dystopian content zoo.
And so, I suppose it shouldn’t have been a total surprise when my chef and server at Jupiter Burger responded to my request to film with a shrug. “The other day someone asked me to wrap their phone up like it was a burger,” he said, indicating the stacked ream of waxed paper beside the card reader. “That was a new one.” We will come to what my order from Jupiter – a newish, self-consciously Californian-inspired fast food stand in Hackney – actually tasted like in a minute.
But this little moment, to me, seemed to encapsulate so much of the frenetic, confounding absurdity of what we might hesitantly call London’s burgersphere. Burgers are the concept powering every other TikTok-drunk, opportunist takeaway on your local high street. Burgers are the soft power vector for a fascinating, broader revolution in the field of quick service halal dining, initiated by British Asian entrepreneurs. Burgers are an unofficial course category at post-Plimsoll, small plates restaurants, a non-negotiable at the New York-influenced bistros and pub dining rooms that are freshly dominant, and a vessel for hyper-specific cultural expression in the form of Spanish hamburguesa (Tollington’s) or Istanbul-style wet, Islak burgers (Leydi).
The London burger is Schrodinger’s menu item; both clapped and thriving. Simultaneously durable and, equally, so overexposed that it barely even registers as visible. This review, in a weird way, is a reflection of this. Initially conceived way back in September as a straightforward look at the way a couple of currently retired burger specials – Nick Bramham’s enjoyably two-footed ‘Patty Luger’ at Patty & Bun; Rita’s ephemeral, unapologetically hench ‘Bistro Burger’ – signalled an interesting broader shift in the capital’s burgersphere, it was over-ridden by events and a landscape that refused to stand still. Jackson Boxer’s scarcity model Dove burger emerged; One Club Row’s au poivre-laced effort made landfall in Shoreditch. What began as a snappy trend story morphed, thanks to mushrooming subject complexity and the small matter of having to finish a book, into something I kept having to put off; a kind of neverending, painting-of-the-Forth Bridge of wanging on about fast food.
Thankfully, and perhaps fittingly, this was just a case of needing to properly digest what was happening. The new schism in the UK’s burger multiverse – most obviously reflected in that lurching, deliberate swing from ‘smashed’ to ‘unsmashed’ – tells us something about where hospitality is heading. But, as I learned, over an inadvertently elongated seven months of eating, watching and ruminating, it is perhaps not telling us the thing that we think it is.
Let’s start with Jupiter. Brought to us from the same scrupulously moodboarded stable as Dom’s Subs and Rasputins, this Netil House Market hut emerged at the fag-end of 2024, riffing on a particular bright-hued, Golden State diner argot and talking a very good game. Animal-style sauce. Space-age diner architecture. Instagram images of Superiority Burger founder Brooks Headley. From name-checking ‘Googie’ to enthusing about the precise size of their XL Martin’s Potato Rolls, Jupiter’s launch promised the holy grail of a London branch of In N’ Out that wasn’t one of those baffling, trial balloon pop-ups that still draw lapsed Burger Anarchy readers out to Park Royal and Hendon.
The reality, on a late winter Friday lunchtime, was a little more underwhelming than that. Wheeling my bike around from Broadway Market, I found rain sploshing down onto a bedraggled little red, white and blue kiosk. There was no sign of the queue I had anticipated – a combined result, perhaps, of the weather, smash burger saturation and the brutal caprices of the modern hype cycle – and the unit, staffed by that avuncular, lone grill cook, was hemmed in by considered, unexpected self-serve condiments (white vinegar; a bobbing mass of hot baby peppers) and high-piled boxes of stock. Overground trains rumbled by; two stubbled Hackney guys took receipt of a laden paper bag. It all felt decidedly more shopping trolley-clogged Regent’s Canal than azure Pacific coast.
Blessedly, a shot of sunshine came courtesy of the burger itself. I had gone for the eponymous Jupiter (there is also a veggie alternative that consciously evokes Superiority’s pulse-mulching, 1970s health food approach to patty construction): a “slightly smashed”, raggedly minced span of Hill & Szrok beef, griddled with Oklahoma-style tendrilled shavings of onion and a seared squiggle of mustard, before a more-is-more profusion of added accompaniments – American cheese, diced raw onion, those pickles, burger sauce, lettuce and tomato – and nuzzled placement in one of those plus-sized rolls. You can conjure it easily, I think. A golden, slightly squashed pillow of wrinkled, sweet bread; high-grade meat with a deep, crackled sear, hard-fried protruding onions and a soft, voluptuous overhang; polyphonic, salad crunch as a consciously foregrounded element. The overwhelming picture, as I dug in, was of Jules Winnfield biting down on a Big Kahuna burger. The twice-cooked fries, a sharply crisped, dangerously moreish golden cascade, remind you that potato skin contributes to heady flavour as much as aesthetic rusticity. There is a certain kind of messily abundant, green market-fresh West Coast burger vernacular, alive in fantasy and half-remembered diner memories, that Jupiter has managed to channel with real success and specificity.
However, as I jammed paper wrapping and a wodge of sullied napkins into a bin, I felt as though something was slightly missing. The burger was impressive. But it didn’t feel as revelatory or novel a come-to-Jesus moment as first descending on a Bleecker Black in the shadow of The Hungerford Bridge or gripping a Four Legs burger on an unsteady stool in The Compton Arms. “You’re that food writer, right?” said one of those stubbled guys, the only other customers, as I wheeled my bike back out from the canopy into the half-hearted afternoon downpour. “What did you think?” I mumbled some positive words before batting the question back. “It was OK,” he said, forming the unimpressed expression of an aficionado. “I thought the burger didn’t have enough seasoning.”
This seemed to encapsulate it – the sense that London’s Vittles-pilled food enthusiasts (complimentary) are so spoiled for choice and quality that very good burgers which, even a decade ago, would have melted heads and made fortunes, are now judged hypercritically. Maybe this was what was slightly muffling my ardour. Or maybe it was the simple fact that, just a few weeks earlier, I had tried a completely different, largely unheralded burger that really had completely blown my mind.
The visual roll-out for Buster’s looks, in retrospect, either like naive over-ambitiousness or wilful obfuscation. This Brixton burger restaurant – a late-2024 reimagining of the fried chicken business Other Side Fried – was announced with moody, high glamour press photos of fast food dishes contrastingly set beside bottles of natural wine; much pre-launch emphasis was placed on the use of Welsh wagyu beef, chocolate mousse desserts and complex dips spurted from fine dining-coded espuma guns.
Whatever sort of business that would conjure in your mind, it probably isn’t a tiny, stripped-back railway arch unit, manned by just one or two employees, and rocked now and then by the rattling force of passing trains. A lot of those promised high-low, cheffy flourishes – the chocolate mousse pudding, an indulgent metal coupe of IPA cheese sauce – have been either quietly binned or reconsidered in pursuit of what very much feels like an ‘in this economy?’ piece of conceptual downshifting (recently, Other Side Fried’s poultry dishes have been confusingly added back to the menu).
Still, let’s not focus on what is missing. What is still very much intact is the signature cheeseburger: an expression of the form so beautifully constructed that it has genuinely made me laugh out loud each time I have eaten it. Custom-baked, hectically seeded potato roll. Faintly cloched bib of cheese-melt. Modestly sized, unsmashed patty, unadorned by pickles, and with a piercing, buttery umami. So much about the burger has a bracing clarity, and swims against the tide of what has come to be the smash burger orthodoxy. Yet it is the proprietary, khaki-hued spill of peppercorn dijonnaise – indulgent without being overbearing and possessed of a bright note of fruity, popping heat – that is its most striking and effective innovation. Where the burger at Jupiter extrapolates commendably on the familiar, Buster’s offers a kind of invigorating, truly novel reconfiguration of flavour fundamentals that have long seemed like they cannot (and should not) be even slightly reconfigured. If it was in Soho or Hackney it would have surely had more sustained attention. And yet, the fact this piece of premium, carefully wrought creativity costs £11 and lurks unbidden in a juddering Brixton troll hole, is also a sort of perfect distillation of the boundless, everyday indulgence of London’s burgersphere.
It has never been harder, in the broad medium of griddled mince wedged between bread, to create something interesting or culturally penetrative. And yet, the burger, smashed or otherwise, still abides as both crutch, calling card and creative springboard. The real thing fuelling smash burger dominance may be a need for minimal lift, comfort-forward businesses that can be run by one person. All the same, Jupiter, Dove and Buster’s all remind us of a tightly-gripped, eternal truth: that our best ever burger may very well be our next one.
Buster’s Burger
3 Atlantic Road, SW9 8HX
@busterslondon
Jupiter Burger
13-23 Westgate Street, E8 3RL
@jupiter__burger
A highly selective London tavern burger index
Joe Allen
That the ‘secret burger’ at this barnacled, theatreland institution – arguably London’s most famous off-menu item – is now very much designated on the actual menu with a QR code feels both gently depressing and wholly predictable. (Having had a look, they seem to have been advertising the burger’s presence via rib-nudging, unsubtle signs since at least 2011 so this is a fridge-cold take.) It was undoubtedly once a hugely influential London burger; a thrusting, authentically New York hit of lavish char and indulgence in a 1980s-era when most of Britain’s culinary Americana was grease-sodden and inept. But today’s burger – hefty but underseasoned and slotted in a flavourless, dense and pointlessly charred bun – feels like the worst kind of throwback. Experience absolutely not helped by an unexpected gang of twentysomething G-splitters talking loudly about getting “back on the old Hingeroony”.
Rita’s
You know that scene in the early ‘00s film adaptation of High Fidelity? The one when John Cusack’s character decides he’s going to sell five copies of a Beta Band record by simply playing the first strains of it to a shop-full of captive, crate-digging rock dads? Well, Gabriel Pryce of Rita’s did something similar last September. A sunlit shot of a new lunchtime special, a vertiginous, drippy pile-up of avowedly unsmashed HG Walter beef, glazed sesame seed bun, melted Monterey jack cheese and black pepper burger sauce called the Bistro Burger, that was like siren song to a particular kind of patty enthusiast. Pryce had to take it off the menu after just a few weeks – Westminster council’s strictures around rare-cooked burgers having made life difficult – but those that were lucky enough to have had it (complete with snozzcumber-sized additional pickles) will attest that it might be one of the best the city has ever seen. We really lost a real one.
Dove
It was a lightbulb-pinging trip to New York that precipitated Jackson Boxer’s hit reboot of Orasay. With that in mind, it makes sense that Dove’s most indelible success is a burger in the Rubenesque, uncompromising style of Peter Luger, The Spotted Pig and Red Hook Tavern. Albeit one with a pronounced French accent and expressive, Gallic gesticulation. You may bristle at the similarly very Manhattan scarcity model (only 10 are made a day). You may, more generally, flinch a little reflexively at the amount of critical attention and adulation this canny reimagining has received. But what cannot be denied is the transcendent, dream-stalking specialness and deceptive simplicity of this thing. Glistening, tallowy bun like something from a 2 Live Crew video; plump, profoundly intense beef; a dance of fragrant, jabbing gorgonzola and Lyonnaise onion sweetness. Just indescribably, hauntingly good and (alongside the dish of Iberiko tomatoes and chilli crisp) the mark of a terrific, fleet-footed little restaurant.
Picky events – and ticket giveaway
Look, I have banged on about it on Instagram a little already but, genuinely had such a terrific time interviewing Prue Leith to kick off the British Library’s Food Season. It really did feel like priming the pump for the events that I’m going to be doing around Picky’s publication – in just six weeks; pre-order here if you haven’t already – and well into the autumn. I’ll cover details of all of them in an upcoming post. But I wanted to flag the one I’m doing on 17 May at Fleet Street Quarter’s Festival of Words. It’s going to be a conversation about the evolving state of food writing with Melissa Thompson and Leyla Kazim (two of my faves), I’ll be talking a bit more about Picky and signing books after, AND, I have two complimentary tickets that I want to give away on here. Send me a message – with a recommendation of an unexpected place to eat that I should try for Seconds. I’ll pick my favourite and dish out the tickets. If you miss out, or visiting London events isn’t convenient, I’ll try to do some more giveaways of tickets and other bits on here.
Finally, solidarity and love to the trans community and those that understand that, rather than some malevolent outside group, they are a connected minority – our friends, colleagues, partners and relatives who simply want to exist and thrive. Protect the dolls, basically.
Much more soon
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