Any hamburger enthusiast will tell you the dream: after years and years of perfecting your homemade burger creations, on a whim you enter Grillstock – the UK’s biggest BBQ competition. Somehow, in amongst fierce competition and up against seasoned professionals from restaurants around the country, you win the coveted Burger Of The Year title. Oh, and your victory earns you a place at The World Food Championships in Las Vegas, this time fighting for the title of World’s Best Burger. Which you come 2nd in.
For Herefordshire-born The Beefy Boys, that was no dream.
We always say The Beefy Boys is a drunken BBQ that’s really got out of hand.
Anthony Murphy, AKA Murf, to Ludlow Food Festival
It may have started humbly with backyard barbecues between 4 friends who just loved burgers, but the success of the Beefy Boys brand now resembles a runaway train with no signs of stopping. Before the success at Grillstock in 2014, they’d already begun staging pop-ups in conjunction with events around Herefordshire, and started building a strong following in their home county. It was the incredible result at The World Food Championships that took things to the next level though: their pop-up queues suddenly grew, and the boys were now regularly seeing lines of more than 500 people wait patiently for a chance to get their hands on what had been crowned the 2nd best burger in the world.
It’s been strength-to-strength since then. After years of regular pop-ups, their first bricks-and-mortar restaurant opened in The Old Market in Hereford in 2016, while they continued to travel across the country to festivals and events in a huge, easy-to-spot food truck. That truck, coupled with rave reviews and strong positive word-of-mouth, drove greater sucess that has since led to two further restaurants in Shrewsbury and Cheltenham.
All of the recommendations, glowing social media reviews, and countless awards – they won two more at this 2023’s National Burger Awards – mean that you enter The Beefy Boys with sky-high expectations. Perhaps the greatest compliment to be paid is that every one of those expectations is met, if not surpassed, with flying colours.
The menu is pretty extensive and far bigger than what you’d ordinarily expect to find at an independent burger joint but to its credit, it does well to cover all bases. For those of us with simple tastes, you can keep it as simple as you like: The Lonely Boy is a beef patty, cheese, and a bun. And that’s it. Or you can go for something like The Pizza Boy, which comes loaded with marinara sauce, breaded mozzarella, red onion, pepperoni, American cheese, Swiss cheese, and Garlic & Herb Dip.
Once you make your choice, you then must choose from four different patty options: a standard, 6oz thick patty; double smashed pattys; double smashed Oklahoma onion pattys; or an In-N-Out inspired Animal style, mustard-fried patty. Anyone who struggles with decisiveness may want to browse the menu before they attend, because with 17 different burger options and 4 patty options, there’s a total of 68 different possibilities for you to choose from.
My advice, as always, is to keep it simple. The basic ingredients are more than good enough to provide something special without needing endless toppings and sauces. Go for the Oklahoma Onion Boy. It’s their take on the famous Oklahoma fried onion burger – two patties with ultra-thin slices of white onion smashed into them, two slices of American cheese, in a semi-brioche bun. It is a truly phenomenal hamburger with each element performing its role so brilliantly that you almost forget you’re eating a hamburger at all.
The balance of ingredients is perfect too, to the point where it’s almost difficult to differentiate between them in each bite, and instead it really does feel like you’re eating just one singular excellent thing. The only way I can describe it is that it’s a bit like watching each member of an orchestra play a song solo, one-by-one, before they all eventually come together to play it as one. The overwhelming beauty of that sudden blast of highly polished musical performance sends what feel like electric pulses through your body. And this burger does the exact same thing with every bite.
It’s no surprise really. The beef is 21-day aged comes from their hometown of Hereford, sourced from much-loved and highly regarded local butcher Neil Powell.
The semi-brioche buns come from a sourdough starter, and are made to a special recipe just for The Beefy Boys – also locally, coming freshly baked every day from award-winning baker Peter Cook.
If that wasn’t enough, they even make all of their own sauces fresh on-site. They take their ingredients seriously, and the homemade sauces and specially made buns mean a trip there is a genuinely unique, irreplicable experience.
Months on from the grand opening of their 3rd restaurant, booking a table in advance is still absolutely essential. There has been no let up. And why would there be? With a menu that caters for anyone & everyone, and high quality ingredients cooked by people who adore the art of the hamburger, what could possibly go wrong?
Expansion for local, independent businesses is always exciting but it obviously comes with challenges. Making sure your brand translates to different markets, knowing that a customer base even exists where you’re planning to expand to, and drawing in new customers. For me though, the biggest fear is that you lose the essence of what made you great in the first place. The burger that was so good that it regularly made upwards of 500 people queue patiently beside pop-up food stalls way back in 2014? That’s the burger I want. The Beefy Boys have expanded from pop-up stalls, to food trucks, to now three permanent restaurant locations in three separate towns.
But the hamburger itself? That still feels like you’re crowded around the warmth of the backyard barbecue that started it all.
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The Beefy Boys thebeefyboys.com
Location: 70 Regent Street, Cheltenham, GL50 1HA
Price: £14.10 for The Oklahoma Onion Boy with plain fries
While you’re there: Get a plate of poutine fries. Awesome enough to impress any Canadian natives.
Hamburger Britannia 