Are You Ready For A Rice Krispie-Battered Fried Chicken Burger?

Burger & Beyond ★★★★☆

By Lydia Manch Last edited 61 months ago

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Are You Ready For A Rice Krispie-Battered Fried Chicken Burger? Burger & Beyond 4
A bunful of snap, crackle and crunch: the Krispie Fried Chicken burger. Photo: Burger & Beyond

We go beef-less today, with some wistfulness, because we already know Burger & Beyond's standard cheeseburger work to be flawless.

But we're here to check out their new Shoreditch restaurant, the first bricks-and-mortar spot to get your hands on burgers you'd traditionally have to queue outside their Camden Market or Street Feast Public stalls for. And with new territory comes a new, expanded menu.

Sour cherry cheesecake: worth saving room for if physically possible. Photo: Lydia Manch

So it's the Fried Hot Fish (Nashville hot sauce, kaffir lime mayo, an ocean of slaw) for us, and the Krispie Fried Chicken, a tower of fried free-range chicken, with maple miso butter, and ranch pickles. And extra bacon. And extra cheese. And the fried chicken batter's been laced with rice krispies.

It's not just a gimmick, claims our Londonist fried chicken expert, who calls the combination a work of art — and she doesn't toss fried chicken praise around lightly. The bubbles of snap, crackle and pop in the batter take the crunch next level.

The fish burger's dainty next to the behemoth of a chicken stack, but that's deceptive. It's been dunked in hot sauce during the frying process, and hot red oil leaks out of the burger with every bite: the good kind of oiliness, the kind that's so fiery-rich-sweet that it feels at first like you could eat eight burgers' worth, but becomes enough/too much about two-thirds of the way through one. We doubt we'd repeat-order this over the standard cheeseburgers, but it hits a fried-fish spot that not many London burger joints are nailing.

And the beyonds are as good as the burgers. Lamb croquettes, perfect crispness around intensely meaty, nearly gamey centres; a deconstructed sour cherry cheesecake that takes all the things that could go into cheesecake and then gets vastly more tart, creamy and gorgeous with them.

We're wistful about the 'beyonds' we don't have time/physical capacity for — particularly the fries topped with bone marrow gravy and cheese, like a loucher poutine — but let's be honest, it's pretty likely we'll be back, and often.

Because these are burgers absolutely worth waiting outside in the cold for. It's just nice we don't have to now.

Burger & Beyond, 147 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JE.

Last Updated 15 February 2019