The Fallow Burger

And how it built a concept

Welcome back to Like a Chef; lifting the lid on restaurant cooking for you at home.

This week we’ll be looking at the one of the ultimates in flavourful bites: the burger. What makes a great one, why more is not always more, and why it took us years to give in to putting ours on the menu.

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Thanks for joining us,

Jack & Will

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The Fallow Burger

A lot of chefs fight against having a burger on their menu. Will and I were among them when we started out.

As soon as we started spitballing ideas for Fallow, we settled fast on the idea of a sharing concept. We both love that style of eating - its generous and sociable and relaxed. Having a sharing menu and then…a burger? I mean it’s just a bit weird. A burger is probably one of the most isolated eating experiences a person can have. And if I’m honest it also didn’t feel impressive enough - maybe cheffy enough - to feature alongside the other plates we were crafting with their fresh ideas and technical elements.

It was actually our business partner, James Robson, who started the changing of the tide. From his point of view, he’d always had a burger on every menu for every restaurant that he’d ever been involved with. He wasn’t approaching it with the same creative commitment to the sharing concept - he just knew people like burgers. So he really, really pushed it.

At first we veto’d it. A fine dining sharing menu it would be, and holistically so. We ran with a menu that had no whiff of the burger. And then lockdown hit.

No surprises, that was a pretty spicy time for the industry and Fallow was no exception. Will and I got our heads together to figure out jobs for all our employees, then we shut down the restaurant for 2 weeks. 2 weeks feels like a holiday for most but for us it felt like purgatory. That’s how long we lasted before we looked at each other and went, right, let’s get back into the restaurant and start slinging some burgers. Something we knew we could execute well, just us, to keep the doors open without compromising lockdown regulations.

We worked with Deliveroo and some fancy Mayfair delivery system and built a whole concept and menu based on this new burger. We used to get workmen and bankers coming in every day - the people who were always around and working throughout the changes. It wasn’t long before this humble burger that we had resisted so vehemently started to get a bit of a reputation of its own, drawing a load of regulars who would come in for a burger and chips day in and day out. Sort of funny that it took an international pandemic to get us to realise that there was actually no shame in putting a burger on the menu; that a good quality burger was up there with some of the most generous, delicious bites you could offer a person.

And once we’d got over that initial perception, we realised that it was actually the perfect fit for us as a restaurant that does its own butchery. Beautiful rib caps and rump caps from our ribeyes and rump steaks, gorgeous trim from our fillets, venison and whole roasters, mincing the picanha (the cut taken from above the rump). All the superior quality of this incredibly good, marbled, aged, dairy cow fat coming together to make a bloody tasty burger.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as a ‘secret’ ingredient. It’s not an exciting reveal for people who might expect us to gild the lily, but ultimately a good burger lives and dies by the quality and mix of meat that goes into the patty.

That and the practicality of the bite. A sentence that probably sounds painfully nerdy, but nerdy is what Will and I have become when it comes to burgers. Our old boss Heston Blumenthal actually did a bunch of research on what makes the perfect burger, and he found that the satisfaction of eating a burger is directly linked to being able to easily fit it in your mouth. A burger that is stacked so high that you’d need to unlock your jaw like a python to be able to get anywhere close to a complete bite? It’s not the one.

For us that means 2 essential details:

1. We worked with our supplier to specially create a flat brioche bun for us. Fundamentally easier to get your mouth around than a big rounded dome.

2. A stack of ingredients that isn’t just jazzy to look at but is legitimately satisfying to eat.

And the rest? A flavoursome, smoky burger sauce that amplifies the taste of the beef. Beautiful hand cut pickles which we really pride ourselves on. One or two rings of thin, raw white onion for crunch. Sometimes bacon, and always American cheese. Staying true to what makes a good burger what it is.

Lockdown has long passed but we still have one lovely guy who comes in regularly for a black and blue burger: the original burger from those early days. And even though it’s not on the menu anymore, we’ll always serve it to him whenever he comes in. Although we wrestled so much with the idea of a burger at the beginning, the fact that we now have this little club of Fallow burger early adopters feels so special to me. It’s at the core of Fallow’s identity. The idea that you can come in and have a burger and a beer, or experience something more akin to a tasting menu, or a cod’s head to fuel a party; our menu is now rooted in delivering options to give you, the customer, what you actually want to eat. Conceptual generosity is the thread that holds things together for us, not an attachment to the specifics of ‘sharing’.

And while there’s nothing flashy about it, 5yrs of tinkering have landed us with the techniques to level up your burger game tenfold. Let’s go.