Hamburgers of Jerez
We didn’t get a McDonald’s in Tasmania until 1988 – when I was 18 – and therefore I never got hooked on that horrid synthetic crap. What we did have (not so much any more) was a shop on virtually every block, the kind of place where you could buy milk and bread, a bag of chips, washing-up liquid, a cake tin, shoe polish, and a bilge pump.
You could also get a Hamburger With The Lot.
The pinnacle of Australian takeaway cuisine, the HWTL was cooked to order, so you had to wait up to 20 minutes, salivating quietly to yourself in the corner, while this thing of beauty was assembled from scratch from components sourced by the shop’s owner from the finest nearby supermarket. ‘The Lot’ simply meant anything that the cook could squeeze in between the buns so long as the finished product could still be held with two hands without disassembling itself back into its core elements via your lap.
Perhaps unique to Australia, these babies were not considered complete without a slice of tinned beetroot, which only added to the importance of the unit’s integrity during consumption.
Anyway, my point is that we Australians appreciate a good hamburger. So do Spanish people, it turns out. Only – surprise, surprise – they’re much better at making them than we are, and the raw ingredients far superior than the watery tomatoes and ‘manufactured meat including beef’ that we were fed in Australia. To that end, hamburger patties in Spain are often cooked rare to medium – because anything more destroys the taste – so asking for well-done will cause confusion at best and a smack in the mouth at worst. If you don’t like a bit of red, order something else.
There are few places we gravitate to when we fancy a hamburger (read on) but recently there came unto us the Holy Grail of this fast food favourite. It’s called …
El Escondite de los Carnivoros
This place is brand new and sits in a lovely little pocket of a plaza a few minutes’ walk north of town.
The menu. Well, half of it.
They’re extremely proud of the burgers here, with very good reason. The flavourings are all home made and of the highest quality and the combinations are really thoughtful. A delightful twist is that one of the options (the Escondite) comes with the cheese sauce on the outside, smothering the whole thing, which I initially balked at but quickly came to see as a creative variation on the theme (pictured above). It’s certainly not just melted cheese – it’s cleverer than that in a way I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Not too rich.
The gloves that come with it mean that you’ll walk away cleaner than you would after eating a ‘normal’ burger sans protection.
Apart from the Escondite so far we’ve had the Cheddar, the Cabra (goat’s cheese) and the Barbacoa (barbecue). Each was exquisite.
You can order a patty of 100 grams or 200 grams. A terrific touch. The size of the bun and trimmings don’t change, so if you’re not looking to stuff yourself with cow the lighter option is a good one. You can also choose pork instead of beef.
There’s another page to the menu shown above that has sandwiches and salads plus the usual local tapas like croquetas, solomillo steak in sherry sauce, nachos (another reviewer said they were the best he’d ever had) and even a piece of hake.
By the way, in a town where crunchy chips aren’t the norm it’s great to get perfect skin-on thin crispy fries included in the very reasonable prices. We asked for a dry white wine each (which turned into four dry white wines each) and we got this lovely Tio Pepe half-fino-half-white that was absolutely perfect for the hot evening. €3 a glass, which is about the minimum you’ll pay anywhere in town for a glass of wine.
El Escondite is next door to Albariza wine bar, which is where to go for a drink if you’d like to try the best wines and sherry that the province of Cádiz has to offer.
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When these guys came along we already had a list of our favourite burgers in town, so if you think you’d be up for more than one during your time in Jerez, consider …
One of our favourite bars in Jerez has a terrific hamburger on the menu. It’s simply a medium-rare patty of delightfully smoky beef with a touch of bacon in a brioche bun. It’s rich. In fact, we often share one and offset the richness with a lighter tapa or two (try the cogollas, quadrants of gem lettuce heart with a blue cheese sauce and an anchovy on top). Arguably the most unusual burger in town on flavour alone.
Here we’re in archetypical burger territory. Cheap and cheerful, there’s a variety of variations on the menu and they’re all expertly prepared by the busy lady behind the grill, who I suspect has been doing this for 40 years. A perfectly cooked patty with simple extras, these offerings are low on the grease, so you come away feeling like you’ve eaten something healthy instead of a hamburger. Our friends’ fussy kids were at home with the menu, something that might not be the case at these other places. Speaking of kids, there’s a playground in the square here. But we come anyway.
This place is really interesting because it’s a tiny sit-at-the-bar fine restaurant with first-rate service that’s decided to offer simple tucker like burgers and a sandwich or two. I suspect they’ll one day return to their fine-dining roots, but for now their take on the humble staple is very much appreciated. The hamburgers are based on the McDonald’s style but as they’re prepared by a talented chef they’re about as far from McDonald’s as sole meunière is from fish fingers. There are only a dozen seats/stools at this place, so if you want to eat here and watch the chefs in action a reservation is a good idea.
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Two out of every three bars in Jerez have a hamburger on the menu, so wherever you find yourself you can’t really go wrong. Oddly, the beetroot thing hasn’t caught on in Spain. They’re really missing out.
