ONE of the few complaints levelled at The Trolls’ Pantry’s field-beating burgers is they are over-priced.

It’s a charge that has largely come from the pool of self-appointed TripAdvisor critics, who by their own admission would have been much happier sticking to McDonalds.

And it is true that if you dive in at the dear end of the menu, a double Troll’s Fiery Breath burger with added bacon will come perilously close to £16. Add a portion of dripping fried chips and you going to need a full £20.

So quite a bit more than McDonalds then - but also vastly superior on every imaginable measure.

And it’s the humble burger’s cheaper, more familiar incarnation that this misplaced sense of outrage surely comes from.

The American fast food restaurants that popularised the hamburger are usually mass-produced in factories, frozen, and as thin and flat as biscuits.

With cost-saving fillers like flour, vegetable protein, and most alarmingly “ammonia treated defatted beef trimmings”, we are not talking about a quality or expensive product.

For Paul Clark, creator or Troll’s Pantry, these atrocities have set him on a mission to rescue the burger from mass-market nastiness.

While fast-food restaurants cut corners, self-taught Clark gives them such a wide berth you imagine his accountant must be banging their head against the kitchen counter.

A thoughtful dude, over three years of trading he has honed a fundamentalist dedication to locality, seasonality and sustainability that leaves his peers looking like Colonel Sanders.

Strictly using high-welfare grass-feed cattle and seasonal organic produce from small Sussex farms, he is one of the only caterers in the city to pay staff the living wage – no mean feat with such tight profit margins.

So genetically modified is off the menu, packaging is sustainable and compostable and zero waste leaves the kitchen.

And of course everything is made from scratch.

With this agonising scrutiny of everything, you start to build up a picture of the why Troll’s prices are higher than average.

It would be a waste of time if the eating didn’t match the ethics, but Clark takes his perfectionism to cookery and flavour too, and his burgers are easily the most delicious and ambitious in Brighton.

Beef and veggie burgers are on regular rotation, with just four of each on a time, owing to the painstaking endeavour that goes into each of the multiple elements.

At the more affordable end, The Paladin (‘pure and chaste’), has tomatoes, pickled cucumber, little gem and smoked garlic mayo, at a very reasonable £8.

But it is classics like The Troll’s Fiery Breath, at £10 for a quarter pounder and £14 for a double, which capture the imagination and loose fantasy theme.

Defined by its leftfield Fiery Breath BBQ sauce, a Caribbean sounding concoction of lime, rum and chilli, on paper it sounds worryingly close to a pina colada. Alarmingly there are also other tropical, weird burger garnishes knocking about, like pineapple and peanut butter - but the Fiery Breath was nothing of the sort - a masterful sauce which gifts depth, richness and age.

Adding to all those umami, flavour-boosting notes we have come to love, there's sweet spice from the rum, a background waft of chilli heat and a flush of acid freshness.

It is complimentary rather than overwhelming of the main proposition - the banging juicy beef.

Grass-grazed, it gives the fat a creaminess which has dairy-bucket-loads more flavour then the feeble-flavoured plastic-wrapped supermarket staff. The bun is of course brioche, is of course home-made and is of course wonderful.

As for the chips, they are sensational and easily in the top one percentile. Hand cut, skin on, and triple cooked in animal fat, they are a beautiful shade of brown, and incredibly crispy. The Gourmand has had his fair share of good, bad, average and forgettable chips, but these were so delicious I ate two whole portions singlehandedly.

The immense commitment to quality and ethics easily justify the price if you’re prepared to pay it.

Where the TripAdvisor moaners might have a point is in the slightly scrubby pub setting, which though perfectly fine for a casual burger and frothy Sussex ale, is a bit insalubrious against the restaurant-level pricing and food.

The pub residency could well be the only compromise, and the no-short-cuts ethos could well necessitate even higher prices in its own home.

What is clear is that he has never coveted formality space, having left The Brunswick after they tried to intrigue cutlery and plates.

With the synergy strong between goblins and trolls, for now destination burger hunters must contend with the Hobgoblin's beer-bleach stank, loud music and wafting fag smoke.

The Troll’s Pantry @ The Hobgoblin 
York Place
Brighton

Food - Five Stars (Out of Five)
Pub - Three Stars (Out of Five)
Service - Three Stars (Out of Five)

*The Gourmand always pays for his own meals