Burgers don’t have to be quick, cheap and packed with more chemicals than Lance Armstrong on race day…
By Richie Bardsley
Fast food is naff. We knew it when Morgan Spurlock almost died from too many stops at the drive-through in Supersize Me, and we still know it as fast food chains pretend they’ve changed.
The thing is, that’s fast food. That’s not burgers.
At Chops we had a dream where burgers weren’t flimsy. Buns weren’t pulled from the back of a freezer, the salad was fresh, and the sauces? Homemade.
These weren’t just burgers, these were gourmet burgers – paired with craft beer and eaten messily with hands. Not an oversized chopstick in sight.
Proper Beef
More and more fast food joints are claiming to be rid of the ‘pink slime’ and lean beef trimmings that gave them such a bad reputation. As far as anyone can tell they’re telling the truth. Getting called out again and again isn’t worth the bad press.
That isn’t to say that the ingredients they’re using are good. It’s more like a celebration of doing the minimum.
At Chops, all of our beef is wagyu. It’s sourced from Margaret River in Western Australia, a charming little town just south of Perth – known, like us, for its craft beer.
While fast food chains churn out their burgers on a conveyor belt and freeze them, our wagyu beef is ground every morning in our central kitchen and made into Chops patties.
Proper Recipes
Everything happens in house. Our beef is ground, our buns are baked and sauces sauced. This is where the magic happens, and this is what makes our food so fresh: your burgers at our West Lake, Old Quarter or Ngoc Khanh restaurants have been fully prepared by hand the same day.
Take a look at our buns. They’re thick and fresh. They’re not shipped in frozen, then lightly toasted to bring them back from the dead.
We do have one thing to confess, though. Our lovely skinny fries. They’re not made by us. We tried our best, but Vietnam’s potatoes can be inconsistent. Sometimes they’re waterlogged, full of starch, and sometimes they’re too sweet. You just never know what it’s going to be, and we like consistency so you know exactly what you’re getting with Chops every time you visit.
Proper Chefs
Fast food is delivered to you in a few minutes. To achieve this, a fast food kitchen looks more like a factory. They’ve got a station for each stage of the food. There are no chefs, but workers on a production line. It’s efficient working, but it’s not gourmet burgering.
We consider ourselves proper chefs but call us glorified burger flippers, we don’t mind. All we care about is our food being the highest quality available and making sure that our proper burgers never get mistaken for fast food.
Read More: HOW TO PAIR VIETNAM’S CRAFT BEERS AND PROPER BURGERS
Read More: THE CHOPS GUIDE TO TINDER DATES IN HANOI