Stop me if I’ve said this before (although you’ll need some sort of major implosion of the space-time continuum if you’re going to pull it off), but one of the things that irritates me most is people confiding to me that they know just where to get the best hamburger in London. Or the best chicken soup in the world. Or telling me the secret of the perfect Bloody Mary. Or the only place in New York you can get Caesar salad the way Caesar actually made it.

I appreciate people’s (and I obviously mean men’s) need to show off, to demonstrate the extent of their knowledge, the range of their experience, the clarity of their judgment, the overwhelming importance of their opinion… but the application of superlatives to certain dishes (usually the relatively simple sorts of dishes listed above) is dim-witted and vain in the extreme. Men come up to me, dismally self-important little bankers and barristers in their early thirties usually, to name some barman as the maker of the finest Negroni in Europe, with all the grandiosity and pomp of our forefather Adam pointing at a spotted thing with a long neck and declaring it a “Giraffe”. And it makes me ill.

For the application of superlatives to food is a terrible, terrible mistake. In cooking, the perfect is truly the enemy of the good. It leads only to mental breakdown in chefs and disappointment in diners. We shouldn’t need Plato to tell us that things in perfect form do not exist on Earth.

And yet there seems to exist in the mind of every adult male some sort of platonic ideal of a hamburger (I guess because it is often at the core of primal and formative dining experiences: possibly the first thing you ever ate outside your home, safe because not slimy, exotic because not a fish finger). And this intuition of a perfect ur-burger existing somewhere in the supernal scoffo-sphere allows these adult males to tell you that it can be found only in a little place they know in Wyoming (which shows they have travelled) or in Lucky Seven (which shows they have property in Ladbroke Grove) or in the Hard Rock Cafe (which shows they are Russian) or at Michael Caine’s table at the Ivy (which shows they are Michael Winner) or at Joe Allen (which allows them, when you point out that it isn’t on the menu, to smile smugly and say, “No, but regulars know it is there if you ask for it…”).

And it also allows all these wretched chains (which are not all wretched, in truth) to pester me endlessly to come and compare their burgers with everybody else’s. They have incredibly inflated, superlative-inducing names: Ultimate Burger; Gourmet Burger; Wicked Blinding Mental Burger with Knobs On; and they all boast grass-fed, arse-licked, pan-killed, dry-aged, stone-seared fillet of a half-cow/half-mermaid Sports Illustrated cover girl, ground by pixies and char-tickled over baby maple sapling smoke… and you get there, and it’s just another minced mammal in a bap. And you’re either in the mood or you’re not. That’s how it is with burgers: sometimes they taste like the best in the world, and sometimes they don’t. And it has everything to do with you, and how you’re feeling, and nothing at all to do with the object itself.

I have enjoyed many burgers. In the late Seventies I thrilled to the smell of a fresh Big Mac from the new outlet on Finchley Road, couriered home at 80mph in my father’s blue Mercedes 220SE convertible, so that it came through the front door with the whiff of Imperial Leather and five-star petrol, its polystyrene box newly popped, the sweet steam rising from the plump bun…

I loved madly the double-pattied Wimpy Half-Pounders I would eat walking up Cornmarket in Oxford, on my way to McDonald’s at the top of the street (boy, I could pack ’em away in those days), and also the three Mushroom Double Swisses I ate there when it turned into a Burger King in 1990, and my friend Jim and I queued from dawn on opening day, to be the first inside.

And I loved the half-pounder at Maxwell’s in Hampstead. Classy, because eaten sitting down and with a choice of dressings for the salad. I loved the one I ate there with my friend Jules in the spring of 1988, the week before he died. And I loved the ones I had later, after an evening bar shift at the Dome, because it was open late, with a Long Island iced tea and a Spanish girl called Paula, who worked as an au pair for a Hassidic family in Palmers Green.

I loved them all, and at various times thought they were the best burgers in the world. But what an idiot I would be to send you to any of those places and expect you to feel the same.

But I think I can just about send you to Byron, on Kensington High Street. It’s new and big and built around a central grilling area and looks as if it might be just another outlet of another chain, which is why I walked past it for weeks before going in.

You see, I have been occasionally calling on a young lady who lives in the vicinity, going to the Odeon cinema there and then looking for places to eat afterwards – Timo is still very good, and 11 Abingdon Road,

and there’s a sweet little underground Thai, and a handful of ignorable sushi chains – and one day, when everything else was closed or full, we decided a burger would be better than nothing (which is not always the case).

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