Reviews – Page 33 – Tasty Burgers

Union Burger

Published on October 11, 2013October 11, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 4188 Living Arts Drive, Mississauga
Website: http://ubburger.com/

I was driving to the movies the other day (to see Gravity, which is amazing, and which you should see immediately if you haven’t already) and saw the newly-opened Union Burger right nearby. Intrigued, I pulled up their website on my phone; they’re a chain, apparently, with about a dozen locations.

I hadn’t planned on eating a burger that day, but plans change.

The place is very similar to South St. Burger, right down to the round metallic trays they serve the burgers on. They have a handful of elaborately topped signature burgers, but I went with the original burger topped with tomato, pickle, and mayo. I got it as a combo with a drink and fries and it came up to less than eight bucks.

They have a convenient pager system to let you know when your order is ready, so you can sit down and wait for your disc to light up.

The grilled burger is very, very okay. It is quite possibly the most middle-of-the-road hamburger I’ve reviewed for this blog. It’s neither particularly good or particularly bad; it’s just there.

The patty doesn’t have much flavour at all, with pretty much all of the taste coming from the grill. I wouldn’t exactly describe it as juicy, though I wouldn’t call it dry, either. It tasted fresh, though it also had a very slight amount of the chewiness that you tend to find with frozen, industrially-produced burgers. I’m not sure what to make of that.

The bun and toppings were fine. The whole thing was fine. Very innocuous. I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to eat at a Union Burger again, but if I found myself there, I wouldn’t object.

As for the fries, they were actually a bit better than average, so I guess they were the highlight.

Kevin’s Burger Obsession

Published on September 22, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

kevin
Location: It’s a truck, so check Twitter to see where they’re parked
Website: http://kevinsburgerobsession.com/

Though there are a handful of food trucks serving hamburgers in the city (including Food Cabbie, one of the earlier trucks in the recent food truck explosion, as well as Crossroads Diner and Beach Boys, among others), this is the first one I’ve reviewed for this blog. I guess if you put “Burger Obsession” in the title of your eatery, I’m pretty much obligated to go there. Plus, as far as I know it’s Toronto’s only burger-centric food truck, so there’s that.

Kevin’s Burger Obsession serves a grilled burger; most of the essential burger joints in this city serve griddled patties, so another great grilled burger would certainly be welcome.

On this particular day I found the truck parked near Roundhouse park, but since they’re on wheels you’ll have to check their Twitter to see where you can find them at any given moment.

I ordered the plain beef burger (they also offer pork and turkey), which comes topped with lettuce, tomato, and grilled onion.

Sadly, though Kevin may be obsessed with burgers, his own burgers are kind of bad. I think these hamburgers may need to take out a restraining order on Kevin.

It’s a meatloaf burger. I think I’ve made it fairly clear by now that I’m not crazy about this style of hamburger, but I can recognize a good one when I see it. This is not a good one. The seasonings are actually not all that strong, as far as meatloaf burgers go, but despite that there’s absolutely no beefy flavour here — just the muddled taste of whatever they’ve mixed in to the beef (Worcestershire? I’m not sure).

Much more troubling was the patty’s off-puttingly mushy texture. This isn’t the first mushy hamburger I’ve reviewed for this blog (see here, here, and here); I don’t know what these people are doing to give their hamburgers such a horrifying texture, but I really doubt it’s a coincidence that all these squishy patties come from meatloaf burgers.

This is yet another argument to not mess with a good thing by mixing unwanted garbage into your hamburger. Condiments belong on top of a hamburger, not inside of it. Anyone who’s tasted the burger at a place like Burger’s Priest or White Squirrel knows that all you need is good quality beef seasoned with some salt and maybe pepper. That’s it. Throwing other gunk in there is like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Of course, that’s assuming that you start with very good quality beef, and I doubt that’s the case here. The complete lack of beefy flavour makes that all too clear.

The toppings were pretty good, particularly the grilled onions, and the bun was nice and fresh and complimented the patty fairly well. It was, however, way too big — I was left with a pretty significant amount of superfluous bun after the patty was gone. I’ve said it before, but a too-big bun is a telltale sign of a middling (or worse) burger joint. When making a hamburger, the natural inclination is to shape the patty to the size of the bun, but hamburgers shrink while cooking. This is pretty basic stuff. It doesn’t seem like a big deal to have a bun that’s wider than the patty, but if you drop the ball with something so basic, it’s safe to say that you’re getting other things wrong as well.

Did I hate this burger? Not really — I’ve certainly had worse. But for a place with “Burger” in its name, this was unforgivably bad.

The Fire Pit

Published on September 8, 2013September 9, 2013 by Michael Nusair2 Comments

Location: 6020 Hurontario Street, Mississauga
Website: None

Hoping to find a decent burger near my work, I decided to check out Yelp’s list of the best hamburgers in Mississauga. Number one on this list? The Fire Pit.

I found it troublesome that number two is C & Dubbs (a.k.a. one of the worst burgers I’ve had since starting this blog) — obviously the whole list needs to be taken with a fairly enormous grain of salt. Regardless, I decided to check out Yelp’s number one burger.

It’s a Greek place; the tendency at restaurants like this is to serve a meatloaf style burger with all kinds of spices mixed in, which is what I braced myself for.

As it turns out, I would have been lucky to get a meatloaf burger.

The Fire Pit has a very similar vibe to many old-school places like this in the GTA, with reddish-brown decor, the menu lit up behind the register, and a selection of toppings to pick from behind glass. I went with my usual mayo, tomato, and pickle.

Before I lay into the place, I will say that, at the very least, it’s cheap. I got the quarter pound burger as a combo, and it came up to less than nine bucks with tax. This is, by Toronto standards at least, delightfully cheap.

Of course, there’s a reason it’s cheap. It’s a frozen, industrially-produced patty, and a particularly shoddy one at that. It tastes like a flattened hot dog, basically. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever eaten, but if you put this and a real hamburger side-by-side in a blind taste test, I don’t think the taster would even realize they’re supposed to be the same thing. It just doesn’t taste like a hamburger. Blech.

The toasted sesame seed bun was fine, though the tomatoes were mealy and the “mayo” was Miracle Whip or some similarly sweet mayo-like substance.

I looked up The Fire Pit on Chowhound before checking it out, and found only one quick mention of the place, in a thread dedicated to the city’s best onion rings. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to mix things up, and ordered onion rings instead of fries.

I generally prefer breaded to battered onion rings, though battered ones can be okay if the batter is thin and crispy, with a well-cooked onion inside. These featured a thick, overly-substantial layer of batter encasing onions that immediately pulled out of the ring, leaving you with a doughy, useless husk. I only felt the need to eat a couple before tossing the rest in the garbage.

Canyon Creek

Published on August 25, 2013August 25, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 1900 The Queensway, Toronto
Website: http://canyoncreekrestaurant.ca/

Just once, I’d like to go to a casual chain restaurant and get a burger that’s actually really good. I mean, that’s not such a tall order, is it? A good burger isn’t all that difficult to make. Just start with decent quality beef that’s reasonably fatty, and you’ve won half the battle. Alas, the burgers at places like this tend to either be just okay, or outright bad.

This being a restaurant that specializes in meat, I thought that perhaps it could be the one to buck the trend. I ordered the Canyon Burger and hoped for the best.

The menu describes the burger as coming topped with “crisp leaf lettuce, vine ripened tomato, dill pickle, red onion, Canyon aïoli on a fresh sesame bun baked in-house daily.”

Well, it’s not bad, I’ll give it that. But sadly, it does not rise above its casual chain restaurant brethren; it’s merely okay.

The biggest issue here is that the grilled, well done patty is — like an absurd amount of Toronto-area burgers before it — made with beef that is too lean. It’s dry. I just… I can’t even muster up the motivation to get particularly worked up about this anymore. If you live in Toronto and you like burgers, you will be getting your mouth dried out by too-lean hamburgers. Often. Sadly, it just comes with the territory.

Aside from that, it’s not bad. The quality of the beef is obviously pretty decent, as the burger has a decent amount of beefy flavour.

As for the toppings and the fresh-baked bun? They’re fine. It’s all pretty ho-hum, though you could certainly do worse.

The lightly battered, shoestring fries were okay. Battered fries aren’t my favourite, and they were a bit on the crunchy side, but like the burger I have had worse.

Chili’s

Published on August 11, 2013August 11, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

chilis
Location: 21 Colossus Drive, Woodbridge
Website: http://www.chilis-ontario.com/

I was actually kind of excited when Chili’s opened here back in 2009. It was a much darker time for a hamburger lover in the GTA; this was pre-Burger’s Priest, Holy Chuck, and the many other burger joints serving quality smashed and griddle-cooked burgers in Toronto. It was surprisingly difficult to find a decent hamburger cooked in this style. Almost impossible. Like I said, it was a dark time.

Chili’s serves through-and-through American food, and of course, this includes a classic diner-style griddled hamburger. Or at least, it did. Now? Not so much.

But when they first opened here, Chili’s served a pretty decent burger. It wasn’t anything too great, but this being 2009, a griddled burger made with fresh beef and without any onions or spices mixed in was a rare treat.

Fast forward to now. At some point, the higher-ups at Chili’s must have taken a look at their Canadian competition — dreck like Boston Pizza, Kelsey’s, and Montana’s — and realized that Canadians have very low standards when it comes to casual chain restaurants. So they switched over from making their burgers fresh to serving prefabricated frozen hamburgers.

On my most recent visit I ordered the bacon cheeseburger, and it was obvious just looking at it that it was a frozen burger. It was even more obvious when I tasted it: with its chewy, hot doggy texture and its generically salty, non-beefy flavour, there was absolutely no mistaking it for anything but a frozen patty. It was pretty bad.

The cheese and bacon were both fine, though they did nothing to disguise the off-putting patty. The bun, too, was fine (if a bit dense), but again — there is nothing that can disguise that patty.

The burger came with a side of fries that were perfectly okay, but a bit ho-hum.

To me, the unfortunate changeover from fresh to frozen burgers sends a fairly clear message to Canadians. Chili’s is basically saying “Yeah, we could spend a little bit extra and make our hamburgers with fresh beef, like we used to. But you people will eat whatever garbage we put in front of you, so why should we?” And when you look around at the casual chain restaurant landscape, they might just be right. We will eat whatever garbage they put in front of us; there’s just no other way to explain the baffling success of the execrable Boston Pizza, among others.

(Images of the inside and outside of the restaurant above captured from this video on YouTube. For some reason it completely slipped my mind to take these pictures myself. Whoops!)