Tall story: The Cricket Inn’s posh burger
BURGERS, bloody burgers, was my attitude when restaurant reviewing for a living so I seldom ordered them. There were three good reasons: They were boring, ubiquitous and it was extremely unlikely the chef had ‘lovingly hand crafted’ them as I once saw written on a menu.
Instead he got them ready-made from the butcher and it would have been a miracle if he gave the man a recipe and another miracle if the butcher kept to it. The buns, of course, would have come from the baker, the tomato sauce from Heinz and the pickles from the cash & carry so what on earth was there to review? The pictures on the walls and the overhead model railway, that’s what.
Now those days are over and I can relax a bit. We are lunching at Richard Smith’s Cricket Inn at Totley and while the set menu looks tempting my wife wants fish and chips. I once wrote that for a top chef Smithy probably sells more of this dish than anything and anyone else. But my eye was caught by the burger, what must be the second most popular pub order.
I didn’t feel too guilty as it looked as if someone had sat down and thought about this dish and the Cricket wasn’t going to bowl me a googly. The pattie comprised three cuts of beef, short rib, brisket and chuck, all of which carry a lot of flavour. “Home minced,” it said on the menu just to let you know they had made it themselves. It was sandwiched between a bought-in bun, but a superior one, a brioche from the Welbeck Bakery.
It had all the trimmings, melted Swiss cheese, a gherkin, Thornbridge Beer BBQ sauce, tomato salsa and what was described as purple sauerkraut but tasted no more than sliced purple cabbage. The brioche was good. The dish, with skin-on skinny fries, was £12.
I liked it. I particularly enjoyed the pattie, about 6oz, which tasted really beefy and was coarsely minced so there was plenty to get your teeth into and a lovely burst of mouthfeel. It was well seasoned and I fancied there was a hint of cumin, although that could have been from the curried lentils which unaccountably came with my wife’s fish and chips.
For another £2 I had an extra trimming: pickled onion rings. Not pickled onions cut into rings and battered but lightly pickled rings of onion battered. Nice but they needed to be a tad stronger pickled for me.
While my wife had her food on a plate I got mine on one of those trendy slates, set in a board. It could have been worse: a shovel or a flat cap. Burgers are not the easiest thing to eat. They disintegrate like a bomb full of shrapnel and a board is not big enough to catch the fall-out. This burger towered up higher than it was wide. And the inevitable happened. I got bits in my lap.
The front of house sympathised but said the kitchen claimed it was all about presentation. I’ll remember that next time I retrieve a shard of flying gherkin from the gusset region.
Cricket Inn, Penny Lane, Totley, Sheffield S17 3AZ. Tel: 0114 236 5256. Web: www.cricketinn.co.uk
The Cricket Inn on Penny Lane, Totley
Another helping from Martin Dawes 