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 usually just cause confusion. If you don’t like a bit of red, order something else.
Here are a few places we frequent when we need to sate an appetite for a hamburger.
In no particular order …
One of our favourite bars in Jerez has a terrific hamburger on the menu. It’s purely 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).
Here we’re in traditional 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 very non-greasy, so you come away feeling like you’ve eaten something healthy instead of a hamburger. Weird but true.
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. As I said, it’s very small, so reserve a seat just in case, and watch the chefs in action.
El Escondite de los Carnivoros
A brand-new bar in a cute little square a few minutes’ lovely walk north of town. It’s got a large burger menu (and some other stuff) that they’re clearly very proud of, for good reason. It’s all home made and the flavour combinations are rather unique. A delightful twist is that some of the burgers come with the cheese sauce on the outside, smothering the whole thing, which I initially balked at but quickly came to see as wonderfully creative. It’s not too rich, and the rest of the ingredients are thoughtfully combined to give you the perfect mix of decadence and freshness. That’s me in the photo at the top of the page sporting the included gloves – if anything, you’ll walk away cleaner than you would after eating a ‘normal’ burger.
You can order a patty of 100 grams or 200 grams, which we thought was 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 there. You can also choose pork.
By the way, in a town where crunchy chips aren’t the norm it’s great to get perfect skin-on crispy fries included in the very reasonable prices.
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 Cádiz has to offer.
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Two out of every three bars in Jerez have a hamburger on the menu, and 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.
