Words by Christina Dean
Our heads are smashed in. Death by a thousand slices
People like burgers and pizza – this is not news. A Mintel report showed that 65% of Britons either dined in or ordered takeaway pizza in 2024. Two different burger dishes were amongst Deliveroo’s top 20 trending dishes across the UK in the same year (yes, there was a pizza on that list too). Burger Fest, an event claiming to be London’s biggest ever burger festival, is coming to Walthamstow this September. It’s the amount of and speed with which burger joints and pizza places are popping up in the city that’s causing headlines.
Casual, cheap, fast, handheld – the accessibility of both burgers and pizza go a long way to explaining their popularity amongst customers as well as cooks. Most people will have grown up eating hamburgers and cheese pizzas, and, as we saw during the pandemic, comfort and nostalgia heavily influence people’s dining choices. There’s safety in familiarity; no one needs food to be challenging in a world full of chaos.
Both can also act as a blank canvas for chefs to experiment with. You can get a plain hamburger from Maccies or you can get a Baron Bigod cheese, balsamic pickled red onion & Italian black truffle mayo-topped burger cooked by a two-star chef at Heard. You can get a margherita from Pizza Hut or a San Marzano tomato, fior di latte mozzarella, ‘nduja, hot honey, pecorino stracciatella & guindilla pepper-topped pizza cooked by a one-star chef at Spring Street Pizza. Recognisable foods are ripe for deconstruction, reconstruction and reinvention, and boy has London obliged.
We’ve covered the pizza explosion in London already, going from the Neapolitan boom to the growth of regional American styles to the ‘London-style’ pizza trend. Burgers have been through a similar wave. In the late noughties, Byron and Gourmet Burger Kitchen were big players and burgers were thick and stacked – the more toppings the better, especially if they included onion rings and pulled pork. The establishment of MEATliquor and Bleecker, plus the arrival of Five Guys and Shake Shack, in the early 2010s offered an alternative to the fully loaded, bro food buns. You may remember the brief fad for ‘bleeding’ vegan burgers around 2018. Now we’re firmly in smashburger season; when it comes to patties, thin is officially in.
Lagom, Bake Street and Bun & Sum have been steadily smashing patties for a good few years but it was the arrival of Supernova in Soho in September 2023 that caused smashburgers to go, well, supernova. Now we have Manna; Supra Burger; Jupiter Burger; Dumbo; Junk, two of them, a Marylebone branch is coming this month to join the first one in Soho; Smash + Grab, a smashburger spin-off from Honest Burger; and HANBAAGAASUUTEEKI, a new East Asian-meets-Americana brand. And let’s not forget Supernova – a second site has just opened in South Kensington and a Mayfair spot is also on the way.
London’s smashburger market is clearly saturated but when there’s virality on the table, naturally people are going to want a bite of the bun. However, when the hype machine is being fuelled by influencers proclaiming THIS NEW SMASHBURGER SPOT IS CHANGING LONDON’S BURGER SCENE, and an aesthetic that appeals to 2025’s defining personality type, the Norman, it becomes about branding and not really about burgers. MOST OF THESE SMASHBURGERS ARE DRY.
This doesn’t seem to be stopping people though because the trickle-down effect is in full flow. Just like cerulean blue in The Devil Wears Prada, smashburgers and London-style pizzas are now appearing on all manner of unrelated restaurant menus. London is eating itself. Thank god the city’s supper club and pop-up scene is cooking up something new.
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