How four friends from Hereford built a burger empire

What started as a “drunken barbecue that got out of hand” is showing no signs of slowing down for The Beefy Boys.

More than a decade has passed since four friends from Hereford first teamed up to cook burgers for their mates and families.

Fast forward to 2025 and, with second and fourth-placed finishes at the World Burger Championships under their belts, The Beefy Boys are about to open their fourth restaurant, have two food trucks, cookbooks and acclaim from Michelin-starred chefs such as Tom Kerridge, Sat Bains and Paul Ainsworth.

We spoke with one of the founders of the company, Anthony ‘Murf’ Murphy, to find out more about the quartet’s remarkable story.

“We always say it's kind of like a drunken barbecue that's really got out of hand,” he said.

“It's got so out of hand we have 200 employees. It's been a very weird and mad journey.

“It was about 14 years ago we started. We’re all friends from school or college. None of us have a hospitality or catering background or anything like that, but my friend Dan (Mayo-Evans) called me up. He was having a barbecue for his partner and always knew I was into food and eating, so he gave me a call and said 'do you want to help me cook the barbecue?'.

“I said yes, but if we're going to do it, let's do what we’ve been seeing on TV, which at the time was Man v. Food or Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

“We had a little broken gas barbecue that was Dan's dad's, that had been out in the rain I think for about 10 years, it was covered in rust. So we'd speak to various places around Hereford, go into their beer gardens on a Tuesday night. The daftest one we did was a petrol station, where we had a live fire barbecue on a petrol forecourt, which in hindsight was very stupid!

“We’d sell 10 burgers and make a fiver, but it would be our mates or our mums who would come down.”

How The Beefy Boys Took the UK Burger Scene by Storm

The story took its first big twist when Christian Williams, another member of the quartet, had learned of barbecue competition Grillstock in Bristol, during his time working in the city as a runner for BBC’s Cash in the Attic.

“You have 10,000 people going there,” Murf explained.

“Levi Roots and Jamie Oliver had stalls there and they had this competition called King of the Grill, where you had to cook your best burgers, your best pulled pork, your best ribs, all that sort of stuff. We looked into it and were like this looks amazing, but we've only been cooking this food for a couple of months.

“Give us a couple of years, we'll practice, hone our craft, learn how to do this and then we’ll enter it. Then Dan had a bottle of wine that night he just entered us straight away!”

Showcasing Hereford beef, which Murf describes as “some of the best beef in the world”, the novice quartet won the entire competition with their cheeseburger. That in turn earned them an entry into the 2014 World Burger Championships in Las Vegas.

With the help of the local Wye Valley Brewery to pay for their travel costs, The Beefy Boys headed Stateside.

“We literally thought it would be a lads holiday to Vegas, we’ll come last in this burger competition and it'll be a funny story we can tell people," said Murf.

“But we went over there and we came second in the world. From that moment it just went mad.

“When we got back to the UK, I remember we did our first pop-up. We were used to having like 10 men and a dog turning up for our pop-ups. It got to 12pm, we looked up and there were 300 people turning up wanting to try the second best burger in the world.”

Things continued snowballing. The number of people turning up at the pop-ups in Hereford doubled and The Beefy Boys were beginning to get national recognition, appearing on The One Show on the BBC.

“I remember being stood there looking at this mile-long queue with 700 people on a Thursday and I thought we should probably quit our jobs and take this seriously,” said Murf.

A site came up but the quartet, which also includes Lee Symonds, who previously ran a “really bad” nightclub with Murf, had to battle to secure the funding.

“The guys at the bank in Hereford said ‘we know how big this is here, but this has to get signed off in London and they're looking at your CVs of DJ, DJ, gas engineer and runner for Cash in the Attic and they're thinking this is going to crash and burn, so they won't lend you the money’.”

Thankfully, friends and family stepped in to lend them some cash, the restaurant opened and bookings flooded in.

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by The Beefy Boys (@thebeefyboys)

Ten years on from their trip to Vegas, The Beefy Boys returned to the World Burger Championship, having won the UK Burger Awards in 2023.

This time it was in Indianapolis and again the team from Hereford impressed, finishing fourth.

The Challenges of Expanding Without Compromising Quality

With restaurants up and running in Shrewsbury and Cheltenham, Bath is next on the agenda.

But how do The Beefy Boys ensure the quality remains across all their sites?

Murf explained: “The hardest bit of it is making sure that whether people go into Beefy Boys in Shrewsbury, Cheltenham, Hereford, or Bath, they’re getting one of the best burgers they’ve ever had. And that's a double-edged sword of these competitions. If you win the National Burger Awards, people are coming expecting a minimum nine out of 10 burger. And if it's any anything below that, in their mind, it’s crap.

“It's making sure that we achieve that. Partly we can do that through just making sure we’ve got good quality Hereford beef. It comes from one farm, one butcher, we know the quality of it. We're never freezing it. Again, the bun, making sure that we're really specific on that and we're not compromising on it.

“That's the one thing that we're trying do as we expand. You see it happen so many times, brands expand and it just goes to shit, because the quality drops, they take their eye off it. We're trying to do it in a sustainable way.”

The Future of Burgers: What’s Next After the Smash Craze?

As for the burgers themselves, if 2024 was the year of the smash burger, what does 2025 have in store?

Murf said: “I do love a smash burger, but I think surely we've reached peak smash now?

“Smash has just captured people's imagination in the last couple of years. It makes up 70% of the burgers we send out.

“I think it's definitely becoming a bit oversaturated now. To me, there’s way better patty styles. Oklahoma style is way better than a smash patty, in my opinion.

“I think the reason why smash exploded so much is for a lot of operators, it's a lot easier to train people how to smash a patty. They cook really quickly, they're quite easy to do.

“I think we will see a bit of a backlash to smash at some point. But I think the burger will always be there.”