Then came a conversation about death, food, and what came next.
“We're all going to die.
And we all have to eat on the way.”
It started with a conversation about death. Seriously.
Before Burgerhain, I'd spent 14 years in the Parachute Regiment. After that came private security work in the Middle East, including Iraq. Different world, different life. High risk, long periods away and, for a while, very serious money.
But that life had an expiry date.
What had once been around £20,000 a month dropped to five or six over a couple of years. The work was changing, the rates were falling, and it was becoming obvious that sooner or later I needed to get out.
I'm blunt about what the job actually was. “Basically hired gun work out there. If you like to put it in some sort of PC sort of words, a hired gun, that's what I was.”
On one journey back, I was talking to a Scouse lad I worked with about what we were going to do when we finally called time on it.
“I'm either getting into food or becoming an undertaker.”
I thought he'd completely lost the plot. Then he said something I've never forgotten.
“We're all going to die. That's guaranteed. And we all have to eat on the way.”
That was it. That stupidly simple conversation planted the seed. I didn't know what Burgerhain was yet. I didn't know there would be a food truck. I definitely didn't know Mixmag would end up filming us.
I just knew one thing. People always have to eat.
Blackpool already had food everywhere. Takeaways on practically every other street. Burgers, kebabs, pizza, fish and chips. I wasn't interested in opening another place doing exactly the same thing with a different sign above the door.
If I was going to do it, it had to have a reason to exist.
I kept thinking about the street food I'd seen elsewhere. Proper food. Food with personality. Food that wasn't embarrassed to be messy. Food that wasn't designed by a committee. I genuinely felt Blackpool and the Fylde Coast were missing a proper gourmet street food operation.
How do we build something nobody around here is doing?
I started DJing in 1992. I was 14 years old. Hands on the decks, buying records, digging for music, chasing sounds. It never left me. Through everything else I did in life, music was always there.
And eventually that obsession kept pulling me towards Berlin. Again and again.
The music was ahead of its time. The record shops were ridiculous. The clubs were uncompromising. But it wasn't only about going out. There was something about the people and the culture that stuck with me. Acceptance. Multiculturalism. Education. Peace. Love. People being allowed to be whatever the hell they wanted to be.
“Berlin is way ahead of time with music, so the majority of my wax digging, partying and relaxing is done there. Overall peace, love, embracement, multi-culturism and education.”
Somewhere along the line, Berlin stopped being somewhere I visited and became part of how I saw things. So when I started building this food idea, there was no way I was going to leave that part of my life out of it.
The food and the music had to collide. That collision became Burgerhain.
In 2018, we stopped talking about it and actually did it. The first Burgerhain setup was a food truck called Boris. A mate in New Zealand helped come up with the Burgerhain name.
From the start, I wanted the whole thing to feel different. Not just the logo. Not just the food. Everything. The names, the attitude, the graphics, the way the menu was written, the way the food looked, the way people talked about it.
We weren't trying to make a takeaway look cool. We were trying to build a food brand that happened to operate from a truck.
Almost every major item ended up tied to music in some way. DJs, artists, labels, brands, references that meant something to us.
Desserts became Tresor Treats. Sides became Warm Up Acts. The burgers became the Main Line Up. It wasn't done because music-themed restaurants were trendy. It was just us. It was the world I already knew.
Then the people behind the music started getting involved. I spoke to DJs and people from the scene about what I was building. Big names, people I'd respected for years. Instead of laughing at the idea, they got behind it. They shared it, promoted it, and in some cases helped shape the actual burgers connected to their names.
A bloke who'd been in the Paras and worked security in Iraq, now standing in a food truck talking to international DJs about burger toppings. I'm not sure there's a normal way to explain that.
Not long after Burgerhain launched, Mixmag came to Blackpool and filmed us. For a tiny independent food operation, that was huge. The video went out and, from what I remember, did something like 372,000 views in under 72 hours.
Suddenly Burgerhain was getting seen way outside Blackpool. People who had never heard of us knew the name. The doors opened very quickly.
A viral video can bring somebody to your door once. It cannot make them come back. Only the food can do that.
We use Angus beef. We make our own recipe. We cook fresh to order. We don't believe gourmet street food should be treated like a production line.
Big flavours. Proper portions. Sauce where sauce should be. Mess where mess should be. Food that looks like you're going to need both hands. And if it takes a bit longer because we're actually cooking it, then it takes a bit longer. That's the trade.
Gourmet street food. Not fast food.
We also do vegetarian and vegan options. And Berlin had to make its way onto the menu properly, so Currywurst, Bratwurst and curry ketchup became part of Burgerhain too. There was no way I was going to build a Berlin-inspired food brand and then ignore the food I actually associate with the place.
We started out of the back of a van. Then we moved into the kitchen at Waterloo Music Bar. Now we operate from The Marton Institute on Oxford Square in Blackpool.
Different locations, different menus, different stages of the business. But the core hasn't changed. Same attitude. Same obsession with the food. Same music running through it. Same refusal to become boring.
Burgerhain isn't a chain designed in a boardroom. It isn't a franchise concept created from spreadsheets. There isn't a focus group somewhere deciding what colour sauce bottles should be. It is still us, still cooking, still coming up with stupid menu names. There's an advantage to being independent. You're allowed to be a bit weird.
Blackpool made it possible. That's where people first tried the food, told their mates, and came back. Burgerhain wouldn't exist in the form it does today without that. This is home.
I've never hidden this. Berlin is where a massive amount of Burgerhain's identity comes from. The music, the street food, the freedom, the culture, the attitude. If you ask me where I'd love Burgerhain to end up one day, the answer is easy.
“In time I would love nothing more than to move our brand to its true home. Berlin.”
A business born in Blackpool. Built from a conversation in Iraq. Inspired by thirty years of music. Ending up in Berlin. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't. But you've got to have somewhere you're heading.
It came from the Parachute Regiment. Private security in Iraq. A Scouser talking about undertakers. A lifetime of DJing. Record shops. Berlin. Blackpool. Street food. Burgers. Currywurst. DJs. A food truck called Boris. Mixmag. And probably a fair amount of stubbornness.
Somehow all of that ended up in the same place. And we called it Burgerhain.
Food Hygiene Rating 5, Very Good. Blackpool Council, inspected 10 July 2025.
