It’s a love story with just the slightest sheen of burger grease. Ryan and Megan, who are to be married in September, met three years ago when she picked up one of Ryan’s burger-making meal kits during lockdown from his Swinton burger restaurant, That Burger Place. They bonded like one pattie bonds to another, though without the layer of melted American cheese.
Fast forward three years and they’re spending six days a week together working in a windowless kitchen on a Piccadilly trading estate, building their rapidly growing take-out business. If you’ve ever wondered where some of your weekend or midweek takeaways come from, it could be that it’s a place like this.
Along with Reddish-born I Knead Pizza, Salford burger sensation Burgerism, sushi specialists Asuke and a host of others, Ryan and Megan work out of Jacuna, a warren of industrial ‘dark kitchens’ in what appears to be an unlovely old office block, redeveloped and created especially for the revolution in food delivery (there are branches in London, Leeds and Birmingham too).
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Businesses pay a 'membership fee' for an all-inclusive service at the facilities, which are open 24/7 - a central base from which to process orders flocking in from across the city.
For customers though, no membership is required to get food from these sites - although the ordering comes through apps, in That Burger Place's case - UberEats.
UberEats and Deliveroo riders and drivers come and go constantly, as if there’s a revolving door. In fact, they should probably get one.
For Ryan, it was a no-brainer, taking all the various headaches out of having his own take-out spot - the bins get sorted for him, so do the energy bills, wi-fi, pest control, extraction, everything - and now he gets to distribute his burgers all over the centre of town.
It’s why many takeaway businesses are now opting for dark kitchens - or ghost kitchens, or shadow kitchens or ‘cloud’ kitchens, as they’re sometimes called, a concept which exploded during lockdown.
Businesses like these now contribute to a UK food delivery economy set to breach £12 billion by next year. Seven out of 10 people already use delivery apps regularly, with an average yearly use of £150.
Ryan’s calling to the burger bun came after a trip to New York, specifically a visit to the mysterious Burger Joint, a renowned burger takeaway cleverly hidden away behind a curtain in the lobby of a posh hotel two blocks from Central Park, a place which changed the burger game for many, Ryan included.
“It was like a dive bar, so simple, it blew me away,” he says. You might not find anyone quite as animatedly enthusiastic about the simple burger.
Having grown up in pubs - his parents ran the Golden Lion in Swinton - a life in hospitality was perhaps preordained. But when his dad passed away a few years ago, it left him adrift.
“It was such a kick in the gut,” he says. “I’d grown up in the hospitality world, but my mum didn’t want to carry on with the pub, so it was sold. Life changed overnight, really.”
After the trip to New York, he resolved to start his own burger business. A name escaped him, until he was in Asda in Swinton when an old friend came up and asked him ‘when are you opening that burger place?’ It stuck.
If his experience on the east coast of the US sparked the idea, a trip to the west coast refined it. The couple made a pilgrimage to the iconic In-N-Out burger and also to the likes of Goldburger in Los Angeles, where the art of smashing burger patties was invented.
It is precisely what it sounds. The all-beef patties - in this case, a mix of chuck steak, short rib and brisket - are formed into balls, then spread across a searing hot grill with a burger press. It makes the resulting patty thin and crisped at the edges, and is cooked in barely two minutes.
Smashed burgers are de rigueur these days, and solid, thick patties like hockey pucks rather out of vogue. But Ryan’s are something else. Extreme smashing, he calls it, or an ‘LA smash’, and the result is an exceptional burger, held together only by its own crispiness.
“It’s a crispy, caramelised edge, but the centre is still really juicy,” Ryan says with undisguised pride. “It was our lockdown dream to get out to LA to try In-N-Out. People like Goldburger, Easy Street Burger, they’re doing this style too. Before, I was doing more of a ‘gently pressed down’ burger. Goldburger were so nice, they let us spend some time in the kitchen. They were just surprised we’d come all the way from the UK.”
He opened the first That Burger Place restaurant in Swinton in 2017, an ambitious 60-seater. But it didn’t take off as he hoped it would. There were rough times. One day around Christmas, they took just £19 in a day. Then lockdown happened and he presumed that would be the end of it. “I thought ‘I’ll never go in that place again’,” he says.
But it was his grandad, Bob, who encouraged him to keep going. Bob now has their barbecue sauce, a recipe he used to pull out for family cookouts, named after him - ‘Big Bob’s Sauce’.
Ryan decided to start selling meal kits and doing online cook-a-long videos. “I thought, right, I’m going to make money sitting on my sofa,” he says. Had he not, the business would never have reopened, and he’d never have met Megan either.
Not long after they met, Megan said she wanted to ditch her office job, and jump into the business. He begged her not to, worried she’d be dragged into a world of no days off and cleaning deep fryers, but she wouldn’t listen. She doesn’t regret it for a moment, she says. They make sure they have Sundays off, with no phones, no social media and certainly no burgers.
With a canny knack for marketing, the brand’s presence on social media started to grow and when they opened up again, it was full tilt, with another takeaway shop opening in Walkden soon after. Then last year, his California Dreaming burger got a place in the last 10 of the prestigious National Burger Awards, where he found himself cooking alongside the likes of Bleeker and Meat Liquor in the finals.
They closed the Swinton restaurant in November last year after the unit’s rent tripled, but there are plans afoot. He’s opening another place in Salford in July, somewhere between a restaurant and a takeaway, ‘quick-service’, as it’s called in LA, that will hoover up the student custom from the nearby colleges. In time there will be a proper spot in Manchester too.
Things are flying currently. After moving into the new kitchen, and a recent visit from the bewilderingly popular TikTok ‘takeaway influencer’ Mashtag Brady (he gave the California Dreaming a 9.8 out of 10, and has more than a million followers), they added 1000 followers to their Instagram page overnight.
“This business is so personal to us,” Ryan says. “And because we’re here and we’re together, it’s intense. But we wanted it to be that way. it’s been a bit of a whirlwind really.”
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