You know the question thrown around by anyone interested in food… The platitude of the plate, the boring dinner party posit that stops Geoff talking about the cost of his new boiler and Julie about the mobility in her new hip. It’s a question I have rarely contemplated because I never see myself in the situation, because I don’t live in a country exercising the death penalty. And I don’t think I would feel particularly hungry knowing my number was up at sunrise the proceeding day.

Ah yes, that sacred last meal!

‘What would you have?’ I’m asked. I roll my eyes and try to summon an answer to a query about as likely and pertinent as Portia de Rossi knocking on the front door and being desirous of both me and my girlfriend. And before my answer is summoned, the questioner has started on their soliloquy that is usually one of two things: the signature dish of a quadruple-starred, ponced-up, linen-tableclothed restaurant with an 8-year waiting list, somehow marrying up oysters, Alba white truffle, caviar, wagyu steak, dribbled with a 1982 Lafite reduction… or one of their mum’s home-cooked TV dinners.

There’s surely more honour in picking the latter, but memories of baroque classics appearing from one’s own home kitchen are usually caked in rose-tint and the pleasure was more about the occasion with family than the intensity of mother’s chicken stock. And remember, on death row you will be dining exclusively in the company of a prison guard, wearing a rather unflattering orange jumpsuit and drinking from abominable plasticware.

For those championing the Michelin experience, I freely admit to having eaten some joyous plates by the hallowed saloons inventoried in the Red Book. Quintessential gastro architecture married up to intense flavours and delicate textures. It’s all damn impressive and the real appeal is eating something you couldn’t possibly have dreamed up yourself and produced at home.

It’s the service too. Lots of dedicated minions suavely sashaying around the tables, doling out eloquent descriptors of the food you are about to eat, making you feel important and showing you the love you’ve craved all your life, the love that would have stopped you going into a restaurant of this magnitude in the first place and clicking your fingers at people barely on the Living Wage like the impeccable wanker you most definitely are. If you want snail porridge as your final meal, that’s your choice.

For me, well, it’s the humble cheeseburger. There would be accoutrements for sure (starting with another cheeseburger) like crisp, fluffy, rosemary-scented fries, and onion rings not flaccid through tepid oil or subpar batter. A silky homemade mayonnaise, almost a deep mustard colour from the orange yolks, for dipping the side orders, and Heinz Ketchup as a worthy understudy should the mayo get a bit rich and some acidity is needed.

And the burger itself? It should be impishly uncomplicated. Good quality chuck steak patty, not too thick or thin, decent intramuscular fat content, salty gherkins that crunch like you’re biting into a glass pane, American cheese squares so dastardly malleable and synthetic they will be here long after Generation Z has perished in the Great Vegan Transgender Apocalypse of 2052. A bit of ketchup, a blob of the mayonnaise and maybe, if you want to at least appear health conscious, some shredded iceberg. Nothing else is necessary. If you fatten the burger with additional sauces or slices of tomato, it becomes a tectonic hazard – patty sliding out of the sesame bun (I forgot to mention the bun; sesame with soft texture, toasted), the tomato oozing onto your hand when there are never enough napkins in the vicinity to wipe them properly. Thou shall keep it simple!

Specialist, dedicated burger joints have sprung up in London like silver birch mushrooms, that is to say, apparently overnight. And I’m not talking about the now ubiquitous Byron (financial forecasts pending) or Five Guys, I’m mostly referring to the one-offs and mini-chains who put provenance of meat and method of cookery as their MO. Al, a fellow burger lover and traveller with me on this particular adventure, understands the value of arcane simplicity:

‘Cook it medium, add lettuce and ketchup and make sure I don’t shit my arse out.’

Such profound extrapolations are not born from inexperienced palates. The burger is our pre-gig choice and some years ago, before the patty craze took off, we found ourselves in Bar Boulud as a prelude to watching Paul Simon in Hyde Park, eating the now notorious BB Burger appurtenanced with shredded short rib and pan-fried foie gras. It walked the tightrope between opulence and sluttyness, a first world sandwich occasioned by our bizarre willingness to pay £90 for a couple of pucks of ground meat and not much else…and to think that was ok, something normal people do. I was struck down en route to Hyde Park when the sole of my chelsea boot fell off its mountings and spent the rest of the day with one leg shorter than the other. Lesson learned.

I try to stick to my Burger Rules for Life, but sometimes a menu entices me with a new combination, a grande royale that starts the saliva accruing at the sides of my mouth and I eschew everything I know, everything I’ve learned, and walk the dark path to epicurean damnation. Burger & Beyond is one such place. In Shoreditch High Street, this is one of those gentrified, hip burger bars that must only feel appropriate to be in for students and the art community. Al and I, self-aware and professed ‘speccy twats’, were not uncomfortable – the staff are actually quite welcoming – but there’s the sense this time of our lives has passed and we should leave a table free for those with hair and those who think Jeremy Corbyn is a good thing.

Al was unwavering on his order; cheeseburger with smoky mayo and onion. Clean, basic, delicious. I was seduced by something they call The Bougie Burg and here’s the blurb: ‘Our Signature Dry Aged Beef Patty, Double American Cheese, Steak Sauce 2.0, Marrownaise, Beef Fat Onions’. I’m not sure what Steak Sauce 2.0 actually is and I’ve vowed to never to apply a software term to food in the future, so you won’t be hearing anymore about it from me.

In essence, when the plate was set down in front of me, I was met with a vertiginous specimen (I doubled the patty) oozing with cheese, sitting in a puddle of gravy two-point….err, sorry, well…gravy. It was knife and fork job, no question. And supplementing my one-way ticket to degenerative heart disease were fries. Not the regulation, brittle, yellow, salty soldiers my compadre had ordered, but the fries with bone marrow, gravy and cheese. It appears I cannot say no to bone marrow (let my brothers and the NHS take note), largely thanks to the works of Fergus Henderson and his nose-to-tail eating movement which inspires even the most reticent carnivore to start sucking on trotters.

I ate everything and, should say, enjoyed it. What B&B have accomplished is a sort of merging of the modest hamburger and a British Sunday lunch. I was eating each morsel through a kaleidoscope of reduced meat juices, cheese, onion and mayo with fries taking the role of roast spud. But, as commendable it is to make such a mishmash edible, I looked over to the cheeseburger opposite somewhat wistfully and wondered what could have been…

The menu at B&B isn’t extensive and I’m glad of it. There were two good desserts of a deconstructed cherry cheesecake and a honeycomb fritter, and they serve a decent breadth of craft beers as is de rigueur in this neck of the woods. No coffee, though.

Al and I waited for Lissie to finish her chillingly brilliant ‘piano retrospective’ and sat in Hackney High Street for twenty minutes, drinking a cappuccino under a patio heater of a Turkish café as if it was a quarter of Paris. Times change, people change, but the burger should stay the same.

MWB