THE OXFORD ORGANIC BURGER COMPANY LTD

9:52am Thursday 2nd October 2008

I am far from being a fan of the burger, perhaps as a result of the horrors I inflicted on myself in youth.

In the 1960s, they were called hamburgers — my 1976 Concise Oxford Dictionary still follows 'burger' with [colloq.] — and the most readily available form of this doubtful delicacy was the Wimpy. These rubbery cakes of overseasoned meat within a flaccid bun, while tempting to the teenage palate, were later recognised for the garbage they were as maturer tastes prevailed.

By the time McDonald's arrived on the UK scene in 1974 (at Woolwich, since you ask) I was disinclined to pass beneath the golden arches. This was partly a consequence of my disenchantment with the burger, partly because I was unwilling to become part of a fast-food culture that has done so much to debase modern life. To this day I have never set foot in a McDonald's 'restaurant', nor eaten a Big Mac.

Once, very hungry at Heathrow, I was persuaded to eat a portion of Chicken McNuggets; I think I might have preferred chomping through the box they came in. My destination that night was a Greek island mercifully free of McDonald's or any chain of its ilk. Naxos — where I am writing this article — remains burger-free today, a large branch of Greece's Goody's chain having opened and (such is the good taste in these parts) very rapidly closed.

In recent times, determined efforts have been made to improve the image of the burger. In Oxford, for instance, we have a branch of the Gourmet Burger Kitchen in premises that long ago housed a Golden Egg (remember those?). A few weeks ago, on the page opposite, Helen Peacocke introduced us to Will Pouget's bright idea of an organic burger van for Oxford. Now in Cowley Road, in premises familiar for decades as the Moonlight restaurant, the catering entrepreneur Clinton Pugh has opened the Oxford Organic Burger Company Ltd.

You will note the word common to the second two of these enterprises is 'organic'. To street-cred, which burgers have always had for some, has now been added green-cred. At the Oxford Organic Burger Company, which I visited shortly before setting off on holiday, the menu is studded with references designed to strike the right note with the concerned customer.

"All our burgers," were are told, "are freshly made by Aldens of Oxford. 100 per cent organic beef, sourced from farms in Oxfordshire." As for the buns, they are "made locally by Bread and Co, using Shipton Mill organic flour". Chicken is "local and free-range", while fish is never caught "from over-fished seas or using environmentally damaging methods".

Chicken? Fish? Yes — burgers here range well beyond fare traditional to a burger joint. Besides the nine varieties with beef (including Wakiki with grilled pineapple — ugh! — and bacon, and the Tarifa with chorizo sausage and piquillo pepper), there are a further six with chicken, a brace with fish and three for veggies.

The veggie section, which went untried on our visit, consists of Shroom, with portabella mushrooms and pesto; Falafel, with spiced chick pea cakes, humous and chilli; and Bean Burger, with jalapeno peppers and tzatziki. Fish offers the option of Tuna Melt — a tuna steak with melted mozzarella, mayonnaise, dill pickle and coleslaw — and Grilled Fish, which I tried. This featured a good-sized piece of fresh Cornish pollock, cooked to a shiny translucence and placed in a toasted bun with a garnish, common to all burgers here, of tomato, dill pickle, iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise.

Presumably one is intended to lift the whole thing to the mouth. But since this seemed rather vulgar to me, I tackled it with the knife and fork supplied, then naturally wondered whether I wouldn't rather have had the fish served in a more conventional way, with new potatoes and a few green beans, say.

As it was, I ate it with a carton of chips. Good as these were, the extra charge of £2.50, on top of a dish that had already cost £9.50, seemed to be money-grubbing at its most obvious. Burgers in restaurants come with chips; it's part of the deal. There will be considerable consumer resistance here, I feel, if this rule continues to be ignored.

What does come free is the salad of red and green cabbage, carrots and onion with mustard dressing, supplied with every burger. These, and the wooden bowls they come in, will remind oldies such as myself of the early days at Brown's, in Woodstock Road, where such an offering was made with every plate of spaghetti. Ditto the wooden platters — and the pulchritude of the waiting staff.

Much more of a fast food fan than I, Rosemarie gave full marks to the well-flavoured minced beef — 6oz of it — that featured along with tangy Oxford Blue cheese in her burger. Her mother Olive went for one of the chicken options, with a juicy breast of free-range bird and excellent dry-cured bacon.

While this was a first for her, so — surprisingly — was the Knickerbocker Glory that followed. I had thought these vast ice creams, with fresh fruit, fruit sauce, cream and chopped nuts, to have been a central part of the national cuisine in the generation before mine. Having resisted temptation all her life, Olive finally discovered what she had been missing.

Rosemarie, meanwhile, enjoyed a plate of maple waffles with vanilla ice cream. Leaving them to their munching, I continued to admire the decor which is certainly a major part of the appeal of this restaurant. Anybody who remembers the dingy old Moonlight will be astonished at the changes Clinton Pugh has wrought.

There is even a splendid rear garden complete with full-grown palm trees. Sitting beneath one of the umbrellas there you could almost imagine we'd had a summer.

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