Burger kings: Six top chefs serve up their favourite new-wave burgers

History cannot decide whether the first hamburger was created at a Wisconsin county fair in 1855 by one Charles Nagreen, who saw his clients were struggling to eat meatballs while walking about, so he flattened one between two slices of bread; or by Frank and Charles Menches from Ohio, who travelled all the county fairs (also in 1855) selling sausage-patty sandwiches, until one day they ran out of sausages and substituted minced beef, in a place called Hamburg, New York. But goodness, they've come a long way, image-wise.

For most of the last century, they were considered the runt of the meat family: low-grade, coarse-ground pabulum, short on nutrients and long on bacteria, suitable only for teenage patrons of drive-ins and Wimpy bars (which were named after the burger-scoffing Uncle Wimpy in the Popeye cartoon). The rise, after 1970, of the Big Mac and the Whopper gave the humble burger global fame without doing anything for its taste, or increasing its cachet among food-lovers. "A Big Cajuna burger!" sneers Jules the hit-man, played by Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction, "The cornerstone of any healthy breakfast..."

But look what has happened in the past nine years. The Gourmet Burger Kitchen arrived, followed by the Byron chain of upmarket burgers. Head chefs at hotel restaurants from Paris to the Hindu Kush instructed their juniors to come up with a distinctive meat patty worthy of the place's four or five stars: something as characterful as the restaurant's signature dish or the hotel's House Cocktail; something for which they could plausibly charge visiting Americans £12.95.

As our top chefs reveal, you can put practically anything in a burger: lamb, seawater prawns, polenta, spring onions, paprika, cumin, chillis ... anything, provided the result doesn't resemble the flat, dispirited nothingness of a McDonald's. The new-wave burger is almost aggressively home-made: bound with beaten egg, but falling apart amid its cornucopia of herbs, yoghurt, cooked onions, mint dressing, mayo, tartare sauce. These burgers are designed to be held in two messy hands and devoured with relish (but not the kind that comes in bottles). Enjoy, as they say with more conviction these days in the grill bars of Manhattan.