A small foray into entrepreneurship and some damn fine burgers.
As an aspiring entrepreneur you are always told that the secret to success is to help other people. To get what you want, you need to use your skills, knowledge and passion to get other people closer to what they want. This altruistic focus not only makes you feel good, it gets results. So, a couple of weeks ago I thought of some ways I can use what my talents and strengths to help other people get what they want. A theme that kept coming up was food. And so the idea for a burger crawl was born. I could use my passion for burgers and the London food scene to help other people have a good time and discover some of the city’s best food. It wasn’t a perfect business idea; I don’t think many people would class eating a lot of cow in one night as a solution to their biggest problems, but I still believed I could add value.
To cut a long story short, I managed to sell four tickets for the first crawl last Monday . Even to sell that small number of tickets was no easy task. Without going in to loads of detail, I tried a lot of different marketing channels to varying degrees of success.
Creating and promoting a Facebook page
Leaving flyers in hostels
Harassing all my friends on Whatsapp & Facebook (sorry guys but I thought you’d all genuinely enjoy the crawl)
Running some very cheap FB ads
Pissing off Airbnb hosts by asking them if they could promote it to their guests
Posting on Twitter and tagging the burger joints involved.
Posting answers on travel forums with a link to the Eventbrite page
Passive posts on Facebook
The only channel that has got results so far is Twitter. The whole process showed me how hard it is to become an entrepreneur and that you need to be really persistent to get anywhere. Rejection is a daily occurrence. It’s a bit like being back at school and trying to pull on nights out. I came close to giving up several times but then suddenly, success from an unexpected source.
BURGER TIME
We started the crawl at Honest Burgers in Liverpool Street. Honest has been my go-to burger for a while, partly because I live near Brixton and their first restaurant and partly because the food is outstanding! And they didn’t disappoint this time either.
I love how they keep things simple and fly the flag for a good British burger with no fuss. My guests got half an Honest each plus rosemary salted chips (a must have), some onion rings to share and the mandatory house made Chipotle mayo.
Next up we wondered five minutes round the corner to one of the more recent entrants to the London burger wars, Bleecker St. Run by a former New York lawyer and inspired by her favourite street in Manhattan, Bleecker St aims to recreate the perfect burger that owner Zan Kaufman ate back in 2010. We opted for the Bleecker Black, an award winning burger that sandwiches black pudding between two beef patties.
As you can see, no-one was disappointed.
By now, the inaugural crawlers had eaten one whole burger (although three meat patties), black pudding, fries, sweet potato fries and onion rings. Some of them also opted for a milkshake at Bleecker which they later regretted as a poor choice for anyone wanting to save some room in their stomach! I probably shouldn’t have encouraged them to be fair. It was a very tasty Oreo shake though.
Next up we caught the 149 bus up to Stoke Newington and Stokey Bears, a collaboration between Burger Bear and Bear Hug Brewing.
Now that we were on the Stokey/Dalston borders, my guests were quick to notice we had entered a more hipster-friendly joint but there was nothing too try-hard about their food. The most popular and recommended burger is the Grizzly. Two beef patties, smoked bacon and their famous bacon jam made from twelve different ingredients. The bacon jam lends a little sweetness to the mix and is certainly worthy of its fame. The whole concoction was delicious. The mac n cheese balls are definitely worthy of your money too.
This is where some people started to hit the wall; the Grizzly was a heavier and more substantial offering than the previous two burgers and it was a good thing we had a half hour bus ride/digestion time to get to the last stop; MEAT Market in Covent Garden.
MEAT Market is part of the now sizeable MEAT empire that encompasses three London restaurants, one in Brighton and Leeds, a book and a radio station. Recent reports put its annual turnover at £15 million so they are definitely one of the big boys. Speaking of which, two of my guests actually run their own burger restaurant in Folkestone, called Big Boys. Check them out.
I ordered us the infamous Dead Hippie burger which is one of the MEAT empire’s most popular creations.
It is definitely the most sloppy, messy burger on the crawl and has a very distinctive flavour because of the minced onions and French mustard patties. However, I tend to agree with my guests when they say it is overrated. The other burgers all had more taste and seemed like better quality meat. Gareth, one of the guys behind Big Boys said he had been sending all of his Folkestone friends who came to London to one of the MEAT restaurants, but after tasting the other three, that would no longer be the case.
So what was the best burger? My guests were split but Honest got two votes and Bleecker and Stokey one each. Some preferred the slightly more messy American style offering at Bleecker, while others preferred the simplicity of Honest and one of my guests enjoyed the more upbeat and music friendly ambience of Stokey Bears. Also, those mac n cheese balls.
If you want to see how you rate the burgers, you can buy tickets here. It is running every Tuesday for the next four weeks and we’ve replaced MEAT Market with Lucky Chip, also in Dalston. If you have any entrepreneurial or marketing wisdom to offer please let me know in the comments too!
