9/10 - #meateasy, Above Goldsmith's Tavern, New Cross

Location: On the first floor of the well known, but currently being renovated Goldsmith's Tavern, up a grotty staircase resides one of the worst kept secrets in current popular burger culture, #meateasy. Consisting of a single room, it's small, with an eclectic assortment of tables and chairs scattered about, and the walls papered with pages from the illustrated novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but boy is it busy!

Price:

£7  (Bacon Cheese Burger) £3 (Onion Rings)

Presentation:

It's a burger, on a paper plate, and it looks good! Presented 'bun on' (and that bun is not coming off easily...trust me), with a bit of melted cheese running down the site, now I've had better presented burgers, but what impressed me was this was attempt two - the first time round the burger came to me, (was it Yianni himself?), rushed to my table, apologised for how it looked, and rushed it back to the kitchen to tidy it up!

Toppings:

Bacon and Cheese, as well as some relish, and a wonderfully crunchy, vineagery pickle. The cheese was fabulous, fully melted and had seeped into the meat, welding it to the bun. The bacon was somewhat disappointing, although in fairness I could taste it, as it was miniscule...it didn't detract, but niggled somewhat.

Bread:

What at first glance appeared to be a simple white bap, turns out to be a fabulously dense, doughy bun that was more than up for the job of holding the whole delicious burger package together. As I've mentioned before, a poorly thought out bun ruins an otherwise fabulous burger - and this is none of the former, and all of the latter!

Meat:

This, ladies and gentlemen, is without a doubt one of the tastiest beef patties I have ever eaten. The thick-minced beef had a great long-aged flavour to it, juicy, medium/rare cooked with a unique spice to it. This is what my mind tells me burgers taste like, late at night after a skinful of beers, but it was neither late, nor was I drunk #meateasy, I take my hat off to you, for this is a total meat win!

Plate Accessories:

Nothing. Although we did load up on onion rings (very generous) and chilli cheese fries (phenomenal). In fact even the plate was paper, and the chilli cheese fries came with a plastic fork - we didn't care, the food was so good.

Overall rating: 9/10

To sum up the #meateasy burger experience is tough, it's like trying to explain what it was like being there when all the drummers from Live Earth came on stage and beat the SOS rythmn for the world - words don't adequately capture the experience. But when it comes to the burger...oh man, I didn't want to clean my teeth last night to hold that fabulous flavour in my mouth for just a few hours longer. If ever the Meat Wagon guys want to conquer the UK, all they need to do is upscale and show all these burger chains how it's done.