Under the railway arches, through the Spotlight Bar, and into a small courtyard will lead you to Digbeth Dining Club, the heart of Birmingham’s street-food scene. Each week brings a different line-up of traders, and the big draw tonight is The Meat Shack, the burger bar run by graphic designer Paul Collis. Each burger takes 15 minutes to make: an intricate labour of love involving hunks of meat pressed firmly onto the hot grill, brioche buns, elaborate metal lids, steam, blue cheese, bacon, ketchup, mustard, black pudding. Once ready, Paul’s partner Cat hollers out each customer’s name. “Steve? Candice? Zara? Jim?”
By 8pm the queue runs all the way to the gates, at least 35-deep. It’s a young crowd – students and professionals mainly, beards, blazers, winter coats. They hold pints of beer and gin and tonics, sleeves wrapped around their hands, and their breath flourishing in great white clouds as they talk.
The Dining Club is only open for a couple of hours, closing around nine, and this helps to give a shape to the night; drinkers start their evenings here before heading elsewhere – to the busy bars of the Jewellery Quarter, say. Daniel Fraser, 27, a lawyer, has ordered a Buff Blue Candy Burger, with candy bacon and blue cheese. “It’s somewhere different to come,” he says. “But we’ll probably head back into town for a drink after this.”
Though it’s a Friday night, and the crowd is growing a little tipsy, it is still a startlingly well-mannered affair. One young man has even brought his parents. “He emailed,” says Michelle, 49, a radiologist. “He said we had to come here. It was a bit dark coming in, but we heard the music a few streets away, and it’s great.”Her son Piers holds up a bowl of gunk and burger. “It’s a delicious mess!” he smiles.
The music in the bar grows louder as the night rolls on, through the door spill basslines and chatter, the sound of glass bottles thrown into bins and gales of laughter. Outside, the queue grows longer still: young men in hoodies and trainers, young women in bright high heels, holding little jewelled clutch bags, their makeup freshly set.
David, 20, a student at Sheffield University, home for the weekend, is drinking a bottle of cider, patiently waiting for a Hellburger. “It’s erm… hot sauce, mustard, green chillis,” he explains. He is something of a burger aficionado: “I’ve already had two double cheeseburgers at McDonalds today,” he admits. “The best bit about these is they’re medium-cooked.”
Richard, 32, an operations manager for a contract catering firm, watches as Paul tends to the grill. “It’s good, it’s trendy, it’s personal,” he says. “It’s smaller than I expected, and for me it’s probably not commercial enough, but what you can take from here is trends which we can take into our industry, which is more about mass catering.”
He has a point of course – the burgers range from £5.50 for the classic cheeseburger to £7 for the Red ‘n’ Black Buster, with its beef patty, red Leicester, black pudding and smoked bacon, and Paul and Cat expect to sell around 200 a night. But what brings people here on a painfully cold night, lets them queue for half an hour and then wait a further 15 minutes for their burger is the promise of something different and unique and delicious.
Arron, a marketing student, is celebrating his 23rd birthday with a large group of friends. He has been here a few times, now. “The food is amazing,” he says. “Birmingham’s not London, but it’s catching up.”
@themeatshack
