Friday, February 12, 2010

Byron @ The Intrepid Fox, Soho

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Everyone else has been already and there has been much tweeting from all quarters about the burgers and shakes, so Byron had some living up to do. I was sort of down on the place before I stepped through the door, to be honest. I remember the Intrepid Fox as the most METAL of pubs and in my long-haired stinky youth downed many a pint of snakebite and black before staggering to the Marque club and throwing up prodigiously. It was full of fat, mental goth chicks and bearded men wearing tour t-shirts from the early '70s. It was, for a time, a magical place, unlike any pub I knew (the only other such establishment I knew was a pub in Morden that threw a night called Metal Hammer every Friday or Saturday).

Subsequently, walking past the place and seeing that the same fat goth chicks and bearded men were still drinking in there made me feel that a piece of my childhood still lived on, that if I walked in there I'd see a younger version of myself in a Marillion t-shirt snogging a goth chick with too much eye make up and an ill fitting Kensignton Market bodice. Thank the lord hip hop happened.

Alas, time marches on and it's a slick, modern, visible air conditioning duct sort of place now, with lovingly distressed exposed brick work and a chandelier made out of angle poise lamps. A projector loops a constant assault of images of people eating burgers that made my wife feel a bit ill. It's a nice enough space, suited to the sort of flying visit that a burger demands. I ordered the off menu, super, not very secret Big D. Wife ordered a cheeseburger and then got annoyed at me for not telling her about the super secret burger. Both burgers were bang on, as near damn perfect as a burger could be. Meat packed tenderly together and perfectly cooked. On the downside fries were lacklustre and industrial and the mac 'n' cheese a dry, dusty offering akin to something a flatmate might have cooked whilst at university and then left under the sofa for a week. Other upsides were the oreo shake, which was a thing of magesty and the onion rings which were chunky and sweetly tender.

At nearly forty quid for two it might make some baulk at a burger joint, but they would be wrong. To hold that near mythical beast, a perfect burger, in your hands is cheap at twice the price even if I didn't see snakebite on the menu.

5 comments:

Zeb said...

Fiddling? Yup prefer that pic and the new colour scheme.

Monkey Gland said...

Hey Zeb, thanks!

theundergroundrestaurant said...

So the intrepid fox has gone? Had a terrible date there with an Argentinian vampire. He had long black hair and large coal eyes. I quite fancied him. Until we had a bit of a snog when he took me to Garlic and Shots afterwards. I couldn't stand the biting and the blood. My lips were shot for days afterwards.

Monkey Gland said...

Yup, gone and replaced with burgers. Good burgers.

I heart cupcakes said...

The Intrepid Fox has moved to just under Centre Point and lives on :)