Lockdown might be slowly easing, but London's love affair with having DIY burger kits delivered? Still going strong.
There are a lot of good reasons to jump on the burger kit bandwagon — including heroically helping your favourite restaurant dust themselves off after a Bad Year, by doing nothing more demanding than just eating a world-beating cheeseburger. And also, more selfishly: access to burgers you might not otherwise be in the UberEats zone for; the chance to bespoke your burger with extra cheese, kimchi, pickles, whatever; the price, which comes in cheaper than the same burgers on Deliveroo, and the fact that they'll land on your plate still hot and tender from the frying pan.
Burgers are the DIY home delivery kit in its finest form, needing just enough assemblage/instruction-following to deliver a satisfying sense of achievement, while also at the same time being essentially idiotproof.
Below are some of the best, but lockdown's a constantly-evolving beast: if we've missed your favourite, drop us an email at [email protected]
Burger + Beyond - for the Bacon Butter Burger
These guys made our best cheeseburgers in London list, and with good reason. Their Bacon Butter Burger's a thing of beautiful largesse — bacon-topped, cheese-layered and doubling down on sloppiness with a burnt butter mayo-blanket; demi-brioche buns barely holding it all in and soaking up the meat juice hard. Even we, usually mayo refuseniks, admit this particular version — rich, smoky, good at binding pickled onions to patty — works like a dream here.
Kits come with a step-by-step guide, covering everything down to brioche-toasting technique, order of layering and other contentious stuff that could, in the absence of firm instructions, absolutely tear your lockdown household in two. We added some chilli guac in ours, but apart from that didn't make any changes to the running order: this burger doesn't need many extra frills.
How much? £25 for the makings of four burgers, using all the same ingredients as they do in their Shoreditch restaurant: demi-brioche buns, generous slabs of beef patties made from dry-aged beef mince, bacon, American cheese, pickled onions and their signature burnt butter mayo.
Delivery: covers most parts of zone 1 and 2, plus a lot of other postcodes — check if your neighbourhood's covered on their website. Deliveries are made on Saturday, for all orders that week made up till 11am the day before.
Burger + Beyond: order here.
Truffle London - for the Truffle Burger (including a vegetarian option)
In better times, Truffle serve up ridiculously decadent burgers and ridiculously decadent sides from their Seven Dials Market stand. In lockdown they're shipping you the power to make them yourself, via one of four DIY kit options.
Hard to resist the siren call of the Aged Beef Burger kit: 90-day aged beef patties, caramelised shallot puree, smoked cheese, house pickles, truffle and garlic sauce & brioche buns. But the Truffle Burger — with its beef-bacon blend patties, truffle mayo, fig jam, raclette and crispy shallots — wins, every time. Come on. Fig jam and raclette.
View this post on Instagram
Both kits come with the option to swap the beef patties for Beyond Meat (vegan) ones, which unlike some meat substitute patties, pack enough flavour to hold up against the richness of the toppings. And you can also order their truffle mac 'n' cheese side for an extra £5 at the same time. Not a DIY dish, just a spectacular, truffly slab of comfort food.
How much? £25 for any of the four-burger kits — choose between Truffle Burger and Aged Beef Burger kits, and also between meat or Beyond Meat patties. Delivery comes at £5 extra in London.
Delivery area: London and Essex, with nationwide delivery beyond that for an extra £3.
Truffle London: order here.
Fallow — for the veggie burger
The DIY veg burger kit's just as elegant-but-extra as you'd expect from the reliably great Fallow. Vegan soy patties, pickled pink shallots, a bottle of the Fallow sriracha, kombu seasoning — and some slices of burger cheese so heavily smokey they're overpowering raw, gorgeously rich in the finished burger. You can order the burger kit on its own — but it'd be a mistake to miss out on the corn ribs, dusted with spice, lime squeezed over them, hot from the pan.
How much? £40 for two people for the corn ribs and vegetarian burger box — or there's a version with just the burger kit, for £38 for four people.
Delivery area: nationwide delivery.
Fallow: order here.
Bleecker Burger — for the classic cheeseburger
View this post on Instagram
Bleecker's on-site burgers are reliably great, and their delivery kit's no different, with fantastic quality, dry-aged meat in thick patties. The rest of the kit serves up classic Americana to go with it — a pack of their secret seasoning (go easy on this one, it's very very salty), springy, squashy buns, American cheese slices and a bottle of their Bleecker house sauce, a mayo-based burger sauce with a brilliantly zingy (pickly?) and mustardy edge to it. Filthily gloopy enough to tick all your proper cheeseburger boxes, simple enough not to swamp the quality of the beef.
Generous-sized burgers are matched by a generous delivery zone across the UK — via new food kit delivery service GreatFood2U — meaning this one isn't limited to Londoners only.
How much? £30 for the four double cheeseburger kit — there are also options for two double cheeseburgers and four standard cheeseburgers coming in at less. Delivery costs £5 for up to three kits from the GreatFood2U list of suppliers.
Delivery area: across the UK.
Bleecker Burger: order here via GreatFood2U.
Chick 'N' Sours — for the all-in kit
View this post on Instagram
Great fried chicken's a balance of exact science and high art, so DIYing it in your tiny kitchen with your amateur cookware sounds wildly overambitious. Chick 'N' Sours proved us wrong, with their All-In delivery kit. Comes with the makings of two of their signature K-Pop burgers — a meal in themselves, so brace yourself to tackle the sides: four hot wings, four kung pao wings, four chicken tenders, their seaweed crack (toasted nori), watermelon salad, miso and ginger slaw, and bang bang cucumbers.
The chicken's free range, intimidatingly generous portions, comes with very clear instructions and a choice between deep and shallow frying. While we wouldn't say it's simple (there's fifteen solid minutes where two of us are just feverishly plating up, setting timers, yanking things out of oil and into ovens, checking thermometers, and cramming stuff into burger buns) and you will absolutely have a huge stack of washing up after, it's genuinely not far off being as good as an in-house Chick 'N' Sours, i.e. very good. They sell out quickly, and kits are released at 10am every Thursday.
How much? £50 for the kit — which could feed four people quite easily, or (we can confirm) two hungry people willing to push their limits. Probably worth investing in a meat thermometer for best results.
Delivery area: across the UK.
Chick 'N' Sours: order here.
Patty + Bun — for the Ari Gold cheeseburger
View this post on Instagram
Patty + Bun are shipping out a double-threat of a DIY kit. Both their meat and vegan versions of the delivery package come with two sets of burgers: the makings of two Ari Gold cheeseburgers and two Smokey Robinson burgers.
The two stars of their menu, they aren't miles apart, with both of them (if you opt for the meat kit) made with HG Walter patties, Bread Ahead brioche buns, lettuce/tomato/ketchup, Patty + Bun Smokey Mayo, Red Leicester Cheese and onions. The Smokey Robinson chucks some extra bacon in there, and swaps pickled onions for caramelised. Both very good.
How much? £25 for the works.
Delivery area: across London, delivery on offer every day apart from Sunday. Delivery charges vary.
Patty + Bun: order here.
Vurger Co. - for the (vegan) Big New York Melt
View this post on Instagram
Plant-based burger-slingers Vurger Co. have gone classic with their DIY kit — patties, brioche buns, cheese slices (vegan, of course), lettuce, tomatoes, gherkins, burger sauce, portion of fries. We haven't tried this kit, but Vurger Co. are usually a reliable spot for simple, straight-talking burgers, substantial, meaty and you know, burgery enough that meat-eaters won't be left feeling cheated.
A USP compared to the others on this list is that they do two-burger kits as well as larger versions. To be honest, though, despite not being a four-person household we still don't find it a hardship to finish off one of the bigger boxes...
How much? £17.95 for two, or £34.95 for four.
Delivery area: mostly delivering across east London, they've also added a (could become regular?) west London delivery option on Thursday, 7 May for W, NW, WC and SW postcodes. Check your postcode here.
Vurger Co: order here.
Baggio Burger — for the three-cheese Topolino burger
View this post on Instagram
The Topolino from Baggio — who you might know from their stints at KERB markets, specialising in Italian-American diner dishes — is a triple-cheese hat-trick, the dry-aged and roasted garlic chuck steak patties topped with gorgonzola, mozzarella and parmesan. The kit comes with garlic oil, balsamic sauce, fig jam and rocket, for a brilliantly sloppy, rich burger barely fitting into its brioche. Sounds massively excessive (and yeah, because it is), but the Topolino's a nice balance of the saltiness of the cheese, the intensity of the meat and the sweet gloopiness of the balsamic and fig.
How much? £20 for the two burger kit, £30 for the four burger version. Delivery costs £5 for up to three kits from the GreatFood2U list of suppliers.
Delivery area: across the UK.
Baggio Burger: order here via GreatFood2U.
