best burger I can remember

After four weeks of fine-dining boot camp, I went to Cheltenham. Not a pleasure trip to the elegant English spa town, but as part of a festival panel discussing whether food writing should be regarded as “literature”. (My position, in summary: “abso-bloody-lutely not”.) At the end of the debate, it seemed wrong not to take advantage of the location and go out to dinner, but, perhaps forgivably, I lacked both the stomach and the heart for anything refined.

I’d first encountered The Beefy Boys at food festivals. They had vans. Big vans with tantalising smells and huge queues, staffed by a brigade of tattooed pirates with attitude. Along with many other festival-goers, I learnt to promise myself a Beefy Boys burger for breakfast on the last morning. Sure, the local hotel might offer a fine full English fry-up, but standing with other damaged souls with sandy eyeballs, rubber teeth and a skull full of boiling pus, there was no more assured medical intervention for a hangover than one of their vast, unapologetic meat grenades.

The eponymous “Boys” were four blokes from Hereford who’d met working in construction and shared an interest in backyard grilling that descended into obsession. They began entering their homemade burgers into the insane world of competitive BBQ in the US, and started winning. They said their advantage was simply Herefordshire beef, but nonetheless, they’d taken burgers back into the belly of the beast and prevailed.

Cheltenham put me on their turf, the location of their newest bricks-and-mortar location. It’s the third, in fact, all geographically centred on ground-beef-zero in Hereford, and you couldn’t have kept me away with a Special Forces security cordon and trained leopards.

It looks like an old town-centre pub from the outside, but the interior is a sensory mugging. The basic colour is black, but covered in their trademark artwork, Robert Crumb meets skate-punk cartooning in a palette that requires a welder’s mask. It was about 6pm on a Friday evening and the place was heaving.

The menu is complex and involving. They could have had a tent at the literary festival just to discuss it. As you’d expect from stupendous burger nerds, you can specify how your six ounces of fresh daily, never frozen, ground beef is prepared: “thick” as a single patty, “smash” as two three-ounce compressed patties with interstitial cheese, “Oklahoma style”, which is two patties smashed into grilled onions, or “Cali style”, fried in mustard. If you glazed over during that last sentence, quit now. There is nothing for you here.

After that, you can discuss, with your highly trained and enthusiastic server, the combination of trimmings, either as one of dozens of surreally named suggestions or entirely off-piste, riffing like meat-jazz. I had the “OG Boy, Oklahoma style, medium rare, with bacon, double up”, but then, I’m a man of exquisite and delicate tastes. In case my asceticism wasn’t also self-evident, I had sides of bacon and cheese fries, a plate of “Ghost” chilli wings and a local craft beer. Look, let’s not arse about. This is the best burger I can remember eating since I was about 16. And there’s a very specific reason for this.

That was about the time I started coming up to London from the south coast necropolis where I’d grown up. That was when I first went to places like Peppermint Park, the Hard Rock, Joe Allen’s, Ed’s Easy Diner. Places that either grew, commercialised and died, or should have. But it’s almost impossible to express how different they were back then. The spray-on Americana was still authentic and stimulatingly “other”. The informality and outright deliciousness of the food was completely seductive. The “crew” were young, spirited and seemed to be having an even better time than you were. Christ, it was thrilling. It’s where I fell in love with hospitality, an affair that’s lasted ever since and only gets deeper with the passing years.

I have highly developed prejudices about hospitality businesses, and I happily own them. I think Beefy Boys is amazing because it’s born of amateurism and enthusiasm, and has grown organically with those same drivers. It’s stayed small, committed to a kind of regional loyalism. Simple food done exceptionally well. No corner cut. No exploitation. It’s food x love. There isn’t a drop of cynicism in the place.

There were no empty seats in the dining room. The staff were happy, noisy and hustling. Over my left shoulder was a bit of a rugby team. I don’t know the right term, a half-scrum? In front was a 10-top with golden balloons marking somebody’s 40th. A quiet Chinese family in one corner, three women of a certain age celebrating a divorce with espresso martinis in another. Everyone smiling, laughing, having a great time.

I don’t do sport. Never have. They made me play rugby at school just once, and I peed myself. But one day I made a friend take me to a proper stadium game, the 49ers at Candlestick Park, which rather dates me. I had no idea what was happening on the pitch, but I felt the visceral involvement of being among 64,000 people with a shared passion, even when I couldn’t share it. Candlestick Park is flattened now. I won’t go to Lords, and I’m too psychologically damaged for Twickenham, but I think a full, happy, noisy dining room might be my Wembley.

It may have been because I was coming off the back of a few weeks of 14-course, napkin-and-silverware, let’s-talk-about-food-writing-as-art, but I felt in that lovely, happy, crazy room something I’d feared I might never feel in a restaurant again. If food writing was literature, I couldn’t describe it in a thousand words, so you’ll have to make do with two. Raw joy.