We need to talk about burgers: why Scotland's dirty food trend should be over

When it comes to dirty eating, we have reached saturation point. Dirty in the sense of unhealthy rather than 'creative' use of bananas or whipped cream: the latter's popularity shows no sign of waning on speciality websites (or so I hear).

Once a common staple of North America, the gourmet hot dog, loaded fries and big-ass burgers (known now as a blanket term of dirty food) have gone on vacation to Europe and found a seemingly permanent home in Great Britain.

Over the last few years, dirty food joints in their dozens have appeared on what feels like every urban street in Scotland, each contesting the top spot of burger king.

In the beginning it felt like a genuinely revolutionary thing to be able to eat bad food in cool environs. Again, the negative term refers solely to health concerns rather than flavours, because some of Scotland's preeminent burger joints are doing genuinely good things with fine ingredients.

The use of Scottish beef is commendable. Sales of the brioche bun - that meat vehicle of choice for any restaurant that knows its gourmet burger salt - have rocketed exponentially, to the point where a certain Sauchiehall Street burger restaurant was coy about its bread suppliers when asked in case the questioner was a subterfuge from a rival establishment (in reality, it was just me with manic eyes and a need for knowledge of shiny-topped baked goods).

But as the plethora of pop-ups and permanent places to eat grew in size, so did the issues of being a burger-obsessed city. The restrictive nature of the meat/bread/sides holy trinity. The difficulty in showing nuance and invention in dinner options when 30 other places in a five-mile radius offer pretty much the same output.

When even the first of the Glasgow burgeries (let's go with the word for now) began to reconsider their menus, dropping the now ubiquitous smoked/pulled/loaded options (read: OTT toppings), it felt like a revolt.

As a city - and beyond - we became obsessed with a trend that encapsulates everything that, for some, is wrong with the current dining scene. Too much food. Too little imagination. And too many places that list both these things on their menus.

And so the backlash began. First the physical manifestations of burger ingestion: waking up in the middle of the night with an unquenchable thirst that forces the sufferer to reach for a bedside vase of flowers to drink from in sheer desperation. Then the predilection for food writers to use the burger as a muse.

Truly - how many ways is it possible to write about not just the comestible output from a burger joint but the homogenous interior styling and derivative menu formatting?

Dirty food joints in Scotland are running out of suitably original names because there are just so many, to the point where it is entirely possible to miss a dinner date because you've turned up at Burger Meats Bun and your chum's at Bread Meats Bread (situated a five-minute walk from each other in Glasgow city centre).

And so, a plea. Please, please, no more new burger joints and their weird foibles. No more charging extra for chips - gherkins, or a fat, flat tongue of cheddar, or onion rings are fine. These have always been known as bolt-ons, as extra pleasures. But fries are part of the promise of a burger.

No one goes out for a burger and passes on potato accompaniments, no one except Paltrow and pals. Chips are absolutely necessary. A patron can request their meal without if desired, but it's madness to ask them first. 

I want to live in a world where my tea is served to me on a porcelain plate and not in trendy greaseproof paper. Where it's not too much to ask that I'm handed a single, heavy-ply napkin instead of an entire kitchen roll.

It would be a novel concept nowadays not to snag my clothes on reclaimed wood and have to pretend that a table which began life as an apple crate is quirky. It is not pre-loved to me. It is not possible to be fond of something that leaves a lasting impression on me in the form of a splinter.

In my dreams, heaven is a place where no walls feature exposed brickwork. I am sick of cheeky bricks exposing themselves to me while I'm trying to eat: have some decorum, for Chrissakes, bricks. Cover yourselves up. I pray that good quality emulsion abounds in the afterlife.

The identikit burger joint interior is only part of the reason behind my backlash, because I can live with all these idiosyncratic traits from the good restaurants. Reaching saturation point is not because of a tendency to naturally rebel against something once it reaches the mainstream.

It's not about eschewing the burger for quality sourced asses' milk, or peeled frozen grapes imported from paradise. It's because what is becoming more and more apparent with every new opening is a denigration of quality.

It's about saying that the cheeseburger is great, mac'n'cheese is a fantastic side, and sweet potato fries exactly what I want, but the launch of a new burger restaurant shouldn't be automatically met with a psycho American pageant child-esque hissy fit of joy without sampling the wares first. Restrict greed and gluttony to the eating of food and not the quantity of eateries that offer it, too.

I realise that all this negates my right to ever venture into a burger restaurant in the future. I respectfully acknowledge that every posh fast food joint retains the right to keep a print-out of my face under the cash point to warn staff of my appearance and refuse to serve such a vile burger hater. 

But it's a love for quality that brings this dining diatribe to you rather than a superiority complex, because allowing the good places to stay good is made an awful lot easier when the dozens of impersonators are eliminated.

One of the original Glasgow burger haunts, Velvet Elvis, famously has grafittied on its wall: "Keep Partick weird." It's a whole lot easier to do that when the city's west end - and further afield - is purged of the new dirty dining kids on the block.