Earlier this month I was lucky enough to eat probably the best burger I've ever had in my life. It was a smash burger, cooked quickly on a flat-top to a good crust, placed inside a toasted sweet bun and dressed with little more than deli cheese. And before I get accused of being deliberately misleading I'll say now - it wasn't at Whole Beast. The Friendly in San Diego is a slightly bizarre little operation serving just two things - decent, if unspectacular, pizza by the slice in the New York style, and probably the greatest burger on the West Coast. It's a simple concept but then the greatest things often are - good, coarse, high fat content ground beef, smashed onto a searing hot flat top and aggressively seasoned. Deli cheese is melted on top, and then the single patty goes into a wide, flat bun. So far, so 2025. So this is a tale of two burgers. Or to be more accurate, three burgers across two burger joints. It's not Whole Beast's fault that I had a life-changing sandwich made to a very similar spec in California four days before I found myself heading up Blackhorse Road towards their residency at Exhale taproom, but then I'm afraid life isn't fair. Just ask Dick and Mac McDonald. Whole Beast are clearly burger-lovers, and burger aficionados, as they are doing pretty much everything right in the construction of their offerings. Both have a generous amount of good beef, smashed out flat and wide, spilling attractively outside of the soft toasted buns. The cheeseburger (£13) is a thing of wonderful simplicity made with care and heart - the toasted bread and crisp beef crackle deliciously as you bite down into it, and the melted cheese eases the whole thing along. It really is a superb burger. I like the green chilli cheeseburger slightly less, perhaps because the chilli element comes in the form of a kind of smooth, cold chutney, and there's quite a lot of it, which throws the delicate balance of textures in the smash burger off slightly. I did appreciate the hit of chilli though - they didn't hold back on that - and this was, all said, still a very well constructed burger, with the same crunchy, almost honeycombed beef patty and squishy soft/toasted buns. Their crinkle-cut chips are also excellent, every bit as good as those served by Shake Shack (the only smash burger chain worth bothering with), and holding a nice, greaseless crunch right to the very bottom of the bowl. Smoked chicken wings had a fantastic hearty, bouncy texture that spoke of very good chicken, and a lovely note of smoke accompanied every bite. I will forgive them for leaving the wing tips on (why serve something you can't eat? You might just as well leave the feathers on) because they were so fun to get stuck into, and the "wild leek ranch" they were coated in was a refreshing counterpoint to the smoked meat. The only slight disappointment of the lunch were these cucumbers, which despite the addition of "whipped tofu dressing, chilli crisp, furikake" and something else obliquely referred to as "GGG" (your guess is as good as mine) mainly tasted of, well, what they were - plain, unpickled, chopped cucumbers in a vaguely Japanese salad dressing. And I don't know about you, but I can prepare raw cucumbers fairly easily myself at home. And they don't cost £7. So again, it's hardly a disaster that Whole Beast's version of the smash burger isn't quite on a par with what is regularly spoken about as one of North America's greatest (just ask Reddit) - it's just sheer coincidence I managed to try both in the space of a week, and there was only ever going to be one winner in that battle. The fact is, the E17 variety is still, by any measure, a smashing (pun intended) achievement and a lovely way to spend your lunch money. And London's burger scene is all the better for its existence. I forgot to take a photo of the bill but the damage per person came to about £33 with a pint of Exale beer each. And yes, that is a terrible photo of the Friendly Dirty Flat Top Cheeseburger, sorry - you'll have to take my word for it that it looked a lot better in person.

Making the choice to be optimistic is always worth it, especially when it’s the more difficult decision to make. As Bob Iger, who leads Disney, puts it, optimism is the ability to focus on what matters—steering your team towards the best possible outcome, and moving forward in spite of setbacks. It also means letting go […] The post Optimism vs. delusion appeared first on Herbert Lui.

I don't know if you've noticed but I'm on holiday this week. I don't normally go away on holiday so you might have got used to me always being around. But I'm not around at the moment, I am very much away from home, so what you've been reading recently are a number of posts I wrote before I left. As you can see from today's selection, they are now getting a bit brief. Copenhagen in 2019, and before that Cornwall in 2018. That is a long time not to have stayed away overnight. These days I am much more a fan of the extreme day trip where I head somewhere like Sunderland, Plymouth or Paris early in the morning, see everything I possibly can and am back in my own bed by nightfall. Why revel in buying a £20 train ticket if you then have shell out for a hotel room, dinner and breakfast? What's particularly unusual about this trip is that I'm away from home for a full week and I haven't done that for ages. A week is very much a normal period for many holidays but most of my recent jaunts have been long weekends, i.e. three- or maybe four-nighters. This is generally survivable blogwise, I only have to have two or three posts up my sleeve in advance and hopefully you never notice, as when I slipped away to Tyneside in 2017 or Berlin in 2015. A full week is however much more of a challenge, especially given I don't normally have a back-up stash of blogposts waiting in the wings. Northumberland in 2007. We travelled all over and ate out of an evening and I was essentially off-grid for seven days, text messages excepted. From a reader's point of view it meant the blog went quiet for a week, ditto total radio silence when I went to the Outer Hebrides in 2006, If you're the kind of reader who worries if my morning post is even an hour late you'd have hated that, maybe even lost the habit of checking in, it being ever so easy to lose a regular audience by failing to turn up. Which means that when this hiatus is finally over you can expect a slew of posts about my travels, maybe several days worth, just as I subjected you to lengthy travelogues in the aftermath of Copenhagen, Cornwall, Rome, Berlin etc. This merely extends the abnormal period to a week and a bit - a lot of nothing followed by a lot of sightseeing chat - but hey, you'll cope. Consider this a timely reminder that I'm not contracted to provide you with a lengthy post to read every morning, sometimes I go out instead and just occasionally I go away.