tommi's burger joint, south kensington - event

To the person who said, ‘London can never have too many burger purveyors’ I say, ‘Be careful what you wish for’. Still, they continue to pop up everywhere like a teenage breakout. The burger trend - that feels like it’s been with us since BC times - shows little sign of abating. What’s nice about Tommi’s Burger Joint is that it’s anything but a bandwagon-jumper. The name above the door is that of Tomas Tómasson, the entrepreneur with a small five-strong chain in his homeland of Iceland (one of which I have eaten at - the country knows how to do fast food), an existing site in Marylebone and now this new opening on Kings Road.

The man knows a thing or two about burgers. The crowd at this launch were regaled both with food (tasty sliders, skinny salted fries, bubbles and all the posh homemade condiments you can pile on) and the story behind the deep-running relationship with this fast-food favourite (which outdates any recent trends) from Tómasson himself - he’s quite the raconteur. He joked about getting into the chef business because he could get away with being drunk on the job (I suspect there may be some truth in that), jested that flipping burgers was the only work he could get ‘after rehab’, and that he soon realised he loved eating them. He used to run The Hard Rock Café in Iceland, and claims to have eaten at least one burger every day for the past 10 years. That last nugget of insight was shared whilst the buttons to his shirt were undone in front of a room full of onlookers to reveal a very impressive 65 year old six-pack - his counterargument to ‘fast food is fattening’. One way to make a point.

Did I mention my business card got pulled out of a hat and I won flights and two nights for two in Reykjavik to eat at the original Tommi’s out there (again)? Oh, well I did. That was rather splendid. I’m really looking forward to it - the following they have in Iceland is huge and my visit (when I was there a year or so back) was secured through the high acclaims I came across during pre-holiday eating research. In the meantime, I’ll visit the Kings Road branch again to get my chops around a full sized beast, with extra homemade ketchup.

Afiyet olsun.