Location: 3480 Hurontario Street, Mississauga
Website: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wallys-Family-Restaurant/223907720231

I recently found myself looking for a burger near my work, and again, I decided to refer to Urbanspoon’s list of the best burgers in Mississauga.  This has worked out both well and not-so-well in the past, so I figured I’d give it another shot.

Wally’s is yet another old school diner in the GTA that looks pretty much exactly like every other old school diner in the GTA (I know I’ve mentioned this before, but what’s the deal? Was there just one guy designing every diner in the ’70s and ’80s?).

They’ve got two main burger choices on the menu: the hamburger and the “home made hamburger.”  I asked what the difference was and was urged to order the homemade, which seems like the natural choice either way.  I’m assuming the regular burger is a standard frozen patty; there’s only a sixty cent difference, so I’m honestly not sure why it’s even a choice.  This is completely unfathomable to me, but I guess there must be people out there who prefer frozen?  I would love to sit down with these people and tell them why they are completely insane, but I digress.

The combo, with fries and a drink, is less than eight bucks.  Expensive it is not.  But is it good?

I don’t know.  It’s not bad.  I have a couple of issues with the grilled, well done patty.  There’s definitely stuff mixed into the burger, but whatever it is, it’s fairly subtle.  Honestly, aside from the smokiness and the mild bitterness imparted from the grill, there’s not much flavour to the burger at all.  Pretty much zero beefy flavour; it could have been made out of ground pork for all the flavour of beef that it had.  Who knows — maybe it was.

It also had a soft, vaguely sausagey texture that was a bit off, though nothing I’d get too worked up over.

It’s not terrible.  It’s quite juicy, at least, and there’s nothing terribly offensive about it.  If you put another one in front of me, I’d probably eat it.  But there’s nothing particularly good about it either.  The flavour is nonexistent, the texture is slightly off, and the toppings don’t do much to redeem it — the tomatoes were okay, the pickles were fine (but they were wadded in the centre so I got a couple of pickley bites and then nothing for the remainder), and the mayo was actually Miracle Whip.  The plain, fresh sesame seed bun was unspectacular and fit right in with the patty.

As for the fries, they were fine, but they tasted like the most generic frozen fries that you’ve ever had.