Sydney Chefs Are Livid Over A State Government Crackdown On Medium-Cooked Burgers

Sydney’s gained something of a reputation as a fun-sink, largely because everything from drinking late at night to riding on the footpath has either been banned or punitively legislated out of existence. Even the humble kebab shop found itself in the sights of Sydney’s regulatory zeal earlier this year, which triggered some highly emotional responses from certain people online.

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— Rupert H (@rpy) May 6, 2016

Now the state government has a new target in its sights: the wave of fancy burger joints that have popped up all over the city in the last few years. NSW Food Authority inspectors have begun cracking down on burger places that cook their patties less than well done or leave the centre of the patties pink — a restriction which puts plenty of popular establishments that pride themselves on cooking juicy, flavoursome burgers in the firing line.

State hamburger food safety guidelines, which you can read here if you’re really in a partyin’ mood, dictate that “minced meat should be cooked right through to the centre” and suggest a temperature of 71°C. Problem is, chefs like Neil Perry, who’s opening four new burger restaurants across the city later this year, prefer to cook their patties as low as 55°C to keep them tasty. It’s the same principle as steak: a medium-rare steak has more bacteria, but most people will still prefer it to a well-done steak because they don’t hate themselves and the very concept of taste.

Now a bunch of prominent burger chefs are banding together to fight what they see as unnecessary government intrusion into their business. Speaking to Delicious last week, big-name chefs like Dan Hong, My Kitchen Rules judge Colin Fassnidge, Massimo Mele and Hamish Ingham spoke out against the crackdown, arguing that responsible food outlets shouldn’t be punished for the bad behaviour of a few dodgy operators.

“The restaurants or burger shops that want to serve their patties medium rare want to do it because they know how good the quality of the beef is – they take pride in serving their burgers below well done,” Hong says. “I’m pretty sure a restaurant or pub that knows they are serving low-quality meat won’t serve it rare anyway.”

In fairness to the regulator, people getting sick from bad or undercooked meat used to be a major problem. In 1993, four people died and 151 were hospitalised in the United States from eating dodgy hamburger meat. But since then, sicknesses and deaths from bad meat have fallen dramatically, even going by the stats that include recent outbreaks like the strain of E. Coli that haunted Mexican fast-food outlet Chipotle for months. If a blanket ban on medium-cooked burgers reduces what’s already a very small chance of getting sick from undercooked meat, it’ll also blow a hole in Sydney’s burger market in the same way the lockouts have devastated late-night clubs and venues in the inner city.

If that happens, you can kiss delicious, juicy burgers in the city goodbye. Hong sums up the dismal state of affairs pretty succinctly when he says “Sydney is becoming the most boring city on earth.”

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Via Delicious.