The Burger and Beyond site at Borough Yards is tucked under the railway arches, close enough to Borough Market that the smell of the food halls drifts in through the open front. It’s mid afternoon and the lunch rush has just about cleared, plates of hand formed patties and steak still going out to the last few tables, the low hum of the kitchen carries through from the back.
It started with a bad meal, standing in a muddy field at a music festival, holding a flimsy paper tray of something that was supposed to resemble a burger and cost way more than it was worth. Tom Stock, co-owner of Burger and Beyond, remembers thinking it wasn’t really about the taste. It was the whole setup, people at festivals and events getting served overpriced, underwhelming food because there was nowhere else to go. In 2015 he decided to do something about it.
That decision turned into Burger and Beyond, a restaurant group that serves what has been named the world’s best burgers, alongside American style sides, but in a setting a lot more refined than you’d expect from anywhere selling burgers. Eleven years later, hand formed patties made from a secret blend of beef sit on menus next to steaks good enough to rival the high end restaurants charging three times as much. Everything’s made from scratch, in every kitchen, every day.
But it didn’t start as a restaurant, though. It started as a food truck parked in Colchester town centre every Saturday, before Tom took it out on the road to some of the UK’s biggest festivals. There were a few years of festival circuits and slowly building up capital before the first proper Burger and Beyond restaurant opened in Shoreditch in 2019. Since then, it’s grown to four restaurants and six counter sites in food halls and entertainment venues, yet the original set-up remains, as food trucks are still out feeding thousands of festival goers up and down the country every summer.
Ask Tom what actually sets the business apart and he doesn’t just point to the beef blend, even though he’s clearly proud of it. He says the menu was never meant to be just burgers. “Our menus are not just defined by burgers,” he says. “We have options on the menu to cater for everyone.” The beyond part of the name is deliberate, steaks that would look at home on a much pricier menu but served for a fraction of the cost, backed by a kitchen that won’t cut corners on scratch cooking. Add what he calls genuine hospitality, somewhere he’d be happy to bring his own mum, and he reckons that combination is what puts them ahead.
That confidence has been tested more than once. The pandemic forced Tom to rethink the business almost overnight in 2020, and getting through that is one of the things he’s proudest of. But honestly, it’s the slower stuff that worries him more than any one crisis. Business rates keep going up. Beef keeps getting more expensive. Minimum wage rises are good for staff but put more pressure on a balance sheet that’s already stretched thin. A decade of this, he says, has brought the industry close to its limit, close to the point where charging any more for a dish would wreck the sense of value customers expect.
Ask him what he’s actually proudest of though and it isn’t a number on a spreadsheet. It’s people. He talks about inheriting teams and watching them grow into something far beyond what they were when he arrived, and says that gives him more pride than any end of year profit and loss report ever could. The teams are what built Burger and Beyond into what it is, he says, and their progress means more to him than anything else.
That same caution comes through when he talks about where the business is heading. Tom wants to keep growing, but not at any cost. He’s watched other hospitality businesses go all in on aggressive expansion, overcommit, flood their own markets, and fold within about a decade because of it. His plan is more careful than that: grow within what the market can actually support, not within whatever ambition happens to demand. In an industry running on margins this thin, he says, that’s the difference between lasting and burning out.
It’s a long way from a food truck in a Colchester car park. But for Tom, success was never about how far the business has travelled. It’s whether it’s still standing to make the journey worth it.
