The Dover is one of London’s hottest new restaurants, a gorgeous room on Mayfair’s Dover Street, nestled amid hedge funds and art galleries. The lighting is dim and deeply flattering. The wood panels are polished. The banquettes are soft enough to absorb the most controversial aspects of your conversation while emitting to the room the happy hum of people who know they are in the right place at the right time. Although it has scarcely been open for six months, tables are already on a who-do-you-know basis. It recently opened for lunch on Wednesdays and Thursdays, to help absorb the extra demand, and lunch is already full too. I had one of the most satisfying midday meals of my year there. My order: a burger and a vodka martini.

It is no accident. The combination, as part of a general relaxed-but-smart aesthetic, has been in the ascendant across the Atlantic for over a decade. From the Polo Bar to Minetta Tavern to the Waverly Inn, New York’s most enduring restaurants have one thing in common: you can always get a burger and a martini. You don’t have to wear a jacket, but you probably will anyway. The Dover’s founder, Martin Kuczmarski, was the former chief operating officer of Soho House. He has spent years studying what works in New York as well as London, and realised that London was ready for an injection of luxurious Americana.

A couple of nights ago I was entertaining people, dressed up in a suit. I had a Dover vodka martini, and I had a burger. It’s that high-low thing; low and high at the same time, that’s the beauty of it. You have the high of a very elegant vodka martini, one of the simplest drinks in the world but the most difficult to do well, served in a beautiful crystal glass. Then there’s a burger, which is comfort food. But ours is done with brilliant meat, it’s presented on fine white china. That contrast, with the white tablecloth with a flower in the middle of the table. You feel better.”

The rest of the menu is an equally welcoming list of classic Italian-American dishes: branzino, prawn cocktail, penne arrabiata, zucchini fritti, truffle cheese on toast. “I want people to come back not once a month, but two, three, four times a week. You can only do that if the food is comfortable: if you’re not intimidated by it and can eat it every day. Designing the menu, I asked myself a silly question: if I die today, could that be my last meal? Our opening chef was a Michelin-star-trained chef, but without an ego. I told him I wanted a burger, but the best burger, really well executed, with the best ingredients.”

Kuczmarski is far from the only London restaurateur seeing possibilities in this simple-yet-sophisticated type of cooking. At The Park, one of a bevy of comeback restaurants from Jeremy King, the restaurateur par excellence could have served whatever he wanted: the Alsatian comforts of Fischer’s, or the Grand Brasserie food of Zedel. Instead he leaned into a more transatlantic mode, with a menu you could find in the first class lounge at either end of Concorde: Cobb salad, chicken Milanese, a Chicago-style hot dog. And yes, of course, a hamburger.

In other cuisines — France or Japan spring to mind — high-end cooking often comes with a level of refinement that can suck some of the fun out of eating.

There is a reason that at the end of The Menu, Mark Mylod’s 2022 satire of fine dining, Ralph Fiennes’ chef resorts to making a cheeseburger after suffering a complete psychic collapse. After all the tweezers and leaves and foams and sous-vide machines, there is a refreshing simplicity to meat, cheese and bread, all washed down with nearly neat gin or vodka. Food scientists might talk about alcohol cutting through fat, but there is no need to overthink things.

Besides, the combination is as powerful in a pub as a multi-million pound Mayfair boudoir. Arguably the best burgers in London are being served at the Plimsoll in Finsbury Park. And yes, there is a martini. The Plimsoll’s co-owner, Ed McIlroy, says that while the two items might hail from opposite ends of the culinary spectrum, they have a certain kinship. “A good one of each has barely anything in it,” he says. “They’re both a sum of pretty boring parts that become sensational when they are put together."

And when they are served alongside each other, they become sensational twice over.