Everyone loves Christmas. And everyone loves burgers. So who wouldn’t love a Christmas dinner burger?
It’s that time of year when the festive foods come out to play. The red cups at Starbucks keep arriving earlier and earlier, and I’m sure I had a Pret Christmas Lunch sandwich in November this year. That’s just not really on is it?
Here at TB we get an awful lot of these ‘Christmas special’ food offers and most of them are nothing more than existing fodder with a bit of chutney or cranberry sauce thrown in for good measure. But something caught our eye this year. Prime Burger – the half kiosk/half restaurant posh burger chain found in many mainline UK stations – has produced not just a Christmas burger but a FULL Christmas lunch burger. Now that’s interesting. Christmas lunch is not exactly ‘raciones’ so how on earth do you get it all into a bun. And how do you do it without it being impossible to eat? Prime are probably the best people to try.
This is not just a few burger outlets – the owners have history. The guys behind Prime Burger are pioneers of the UK street food movement. At London 2012 Olympics they ran the entire user-pay food and drink operation at five Olympic venues, they have provided all paid-for public catering at RHS Chelsea & Hampton Court Palace flowers shows and operated food outlets at every UK cultural event of note, including The Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in the Mall, Hyde Park Calling, Glastonbury, Isle of Wight, V festival and many more, including the US Embassy’s 4th July garden party. Not too shabby.
Prime’s Christmas burger has clearly been thought through. It contains a 100% turkey patty, two pigs in blankets, a slab of brie, a dollop of cranberry sauce, pickled red onions, and a smothering of sprout slaw, all in a brioche bun. It’s available with a range of sides but we go for some cheesy bacon fries and some garlic butter fries. Because we just feel we need more cholesterol.
I’m expecting something huge and unmanageable but this is a well packaged piece of Christmas fayre. It all sits together, stacked but not towering, and looking achievable and delicious in equal measure. First bite is good – the turkey is a little salty but its quickly balanced by the sharp and fruity cranberry. The slaw is good – refreshing not creamy and it do what most coleslaws do in a burger and fall out the back end with no hope of reprieve. The pigs don’t make an appearance until the second bite – where have they been hiding???
They do up the salt factor but again the cranberry comes to save the day. The really surprise here is the melted brie. It had huge potential to overpower the whole shebang and make a messy cheesy debacle of the whole thing. It’s not like that. It’s not intense, it’s mellow and it brings the whole burger together brilliantly. It’s a beautiful binding agent, a fromage fixer that links makes the burger work as a single entity. A risky move but one which has certainly paid off.
The fries are good solid stodge. Crispy not greasy and the bacon and cheese are welcome additions. I would have preferred an American cheese rather than a mild cheddar but we’re into semantics now. The garlic butter fries are acceptable rather than exciting. With hindsight maybe the chorizo fries would have offered more.
So if you find yourself already craving that long Christmas lunch, but frustrating find yourself constantly back in the real world where there are a couple of weeks still to go, here’s a solution. Give yourself the works in a bun. It’s like a little bit of Christmas lunch to tide you by until the real deal turns up in a fortnight.
The Prime Christmas Dinner Burger is available at the St Pancras Station branch now priced at £12.95 with fries and a drink.