Location: 1665 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Website: https://www.facebook.com/WallflowerTO/

Here’s a hot tip for all the restaurants out there: if you don’t want to serve a hamburger, don’t serve a hamburger.  Please don’t feel obligated to have one on the menu just because everyone else is doing it.  If all the other restaurants were jumping off a bridge, would you do that too??

The burger at Wallflower feels like it was made by someone who doesn’t like hamburgers, doesn’t particularly get what makes them so delicious, and who decided he was going to try to put his own spin on it.  The subsequent burger is an unpleasant misfire that’s unlikely to please anybody.

I can’t find the menu online, so I’m not sure how they describe it, but it’s topped very simply with lettuce, tomato, and a grainy mustard.

The grilled patty is the biggest offender here.  It’s a meatloaf burger through and through — I’m not sure what they seasoned it with, but it tastes more like kofta than a traditional burger.  Not only that, but it’s overseasoned to the point that there’s zero beefy flavour.  None.  The burger could have been made with pork, chicken, or kangaroo for all of the flavour it had.

It’s also way too dense and finely ground, giving it an unpleasantly tough, chewy texture.  So you can’t even say “well, it’s an untraditional hamburger, but at least it tastes great!”  It’s a chore to eat.

The lettuce and tomato were overbearing, but basically fine.  The sweet grainy mustard was way over-applied, and tasted completely out of place on the vaguely Middle Eastern-inspired patty.

The bun wasn’t much better — it was too wide and too thick for the burger, and was dry and unappealing.

It came with a side of salad and potato wedges, both of which were about on par with the hamburger.  The salad tasted like it was completely undressed, and the wedges were chalky and lukewarm.