I found the only good brand on Substack.
Plus more burgers, a $4,500 Halloween costume, and Khaite's shoe business.
Good morning everyone.
It looks like over 500 of you will be coming to Feed Me’s Smashion Week party next week which sounds like a lot but we’ll cross that road when we get there.
Today’s letter includes: a very good Halloween costume for someone with a $4,500 costume budget, Khaite’s fastest-growing category is shoes, someone stole a baby kitten from an East Village convenience store, and I don’t like transparent protein.
"Feed Me has come highly recommended by no fewer than 10 of my colleagues and I need to see what the fuss is about!” - Patrick, paid reader
Feed Me is throwing a party with Shy’s Burgers next week on Tuesday, September 16th at Time Again on Canal Street. Every day this week you will be getting a short essay from a writer (or someone who knows how to write) about a burger. We are calling this whole thing… Smashion Week.
Jonathan Nunn is the editor of , which is probably my favorite publication on Substack. The way he writes about London — the restaurant scene and city as a whole — has made me open a Google Flights tab more than once. Warning: the way he documents a recent smash burger could derail your evening plans in order to find fried onions.
“Hanbaagaasuuteeki, an ‘Asian-inspired’ smash burger restaurant, whose name is clearly the result of there being no dissenting opinions at the ‘Foxy Mamma’ group that owns it, could not have opened in London at any other point in its history. It sits plumb at the intersection of two decade-long London trends: a slavish deference to the minutiae of American burger consumption patterns, and a new era of Turkish restaurant ownership, one that looks beyond the Ocakbaşı – the grillhouses which are the template for London Turkish dining – and out towards the rest of the world. At Hanbaagaasuuteeki you can order four burgers: a cheeseburger called ‘Not Another Double Cheeseburger’, a Thai-inspired ‘Isaan Burger’ a kimchi burger, and a ‘secret-menu’ Sichuan burger that they tell you is a secret at the counter. The walls are covered in a word soup reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’s mind palace but with things like ‘gochujang’ and ‘katsuobushi’ printed in large red lettering.
Up until, say, five years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a restaurant like Hanbaagaasuuteeki opening on Buckingham Palace Road, a few hundred metres away from the monarchical seat of the country, but circumstances change rapidly in London. I’m old and gray enough to remember that until 2009, we didn’t have a single great burger in the city outside of two luxe steakhouses. I recall this clearly because I followed a Greek guy called Yianni, who ran a burger van called ‘the Meatwagon’, like a dog around south London. He made me the first great burger of my life, and I ended up doing his bookkeeping just to get easier access.