REVIEW: Bognor's newest burger joint is fast food done right

For me, the cheeseburger is the ultimate expression of fast-food decadence. Your pizzas, your kebabs, your burritos and your chicken chow-meins are good, but they can’t match the cheeseburger for sheer indulgence.

There’s something there – in that interplay of bread and beef and cheese – which feels both deeply wrong, and undeniably right. It’s a delicate, if thoroughly indecent, balance and it’s sometimes hard to resist the urge to tamper with it. Eateries with a bit less respect for that unholy trinity might serve up mac ‘n’ cheese burgers, burgers with hash browns, burgers smothered in a too-big portion of pulled pork; greasy totem poles of meat too absurd to really appeal.

At Box Burgers, you’ll find no such silliness. Their cheese burger is a classic, no-frills approach to the American icon: a smashed patty, American cheese, a smattering of pickles and onions, two brioche buns and a glorious swirl of tomato ketchup and mustard is all they need to blow your taste-buds into the next dimension.

None of this is to say there’s nothing more elaborate on the menu - the buttermilk chicken burger looked particularly good, and I was more than a bit tempted by The Big Box, which adds bacon rashers, BBQ sauce and crispy onions to the mix – but what it does say is that the people behind Box Burgers clearly take their food seriously. Sit down for a meal and you’ll find a menu in which every ingredient has been carefully considered for what it brings to the table.

That even extends to the chips, which might be an afterthought anywhere else. They’re good enough on their own, but you can top them up with cheese and bacon, or a Mexican-inspired salsa for that little extra something. The entire experience is on the right side of self-indulgence; this is every inch a treat, but it’s the kind that leaves you wanting more, not the kind that leaves you bloated and confused, head-bowed in gluttonous self-loathing.

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Bognor's new burger restaurant goes down a treat