Leave our burgers alone and sort out the traffic, top chef tells council

 
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Top London chefs today condemned the “nanny state” crackdown on rare burgers by Westminster health chiefs and warned that menus will soon be “written by councils”.

Environmental health inspectors have been told to take a hard line on burgers that are not fully cooked through, but Michelin-starred Angela Hartnett, chef patron at Murano in Mayfair and York & Albany gastropub, said Westminster city council should stop meddling and concentrate on “bigger issues”.

She said: “I’ve eaten raw meat, well-done meat — it has never done me any harm. Why not sort out the bike lanes or the traffic?” She added that “it should not be up to a council” to say what people can and can’t eat.

Mark Hix, who runs Hix Oyster and Chop House in Farringdon and Hix Soho in the West End, said: “It’s crazy. You can serve steak tartare but not hamburgers? We all have consultants, regular checks from food bodies, and it seems odd that all of a sudden you can’t serve what people want to eat.

“It is just a matter of time until menus will be governed by councils.”

Phil Eeles, co-owner of famed burger restaurant Honest Burgers, said his customers would “go nuts” if they stopped selling rare meat, adding: “It is a classic example of a nanny state.”

Nicky Donald, operations director of London steak and burger group Black and Blue, said it had been forced to stop serving burgers rare by new council guidelines on how long and what temperature the should be cooked.

She said: “No matter how hard we tried we could not cook a burger rare with the new time and temperature guidelines. With great regret we had to stop serving them despite strong demand.”

The council denies it is “banning” rare burgers, while admitting it has not recorded a single example of food poisoning that can be traced back to bloody burgers.

A spokesman said the authority was “asking businesses to have controls in place to tackle bacteria in under-cooked meat”. The council is willing to meet proprietors to “work with them” on the issue, he said.

The Standard reported last week that the Davy’s chain is to take the authority to the High Court following a challenge by environmental health officers over the way it was serving burgers.

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