Tasty Burgers

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!)

Origin

Published on July 28, 2013July 28, 2013 by Michael Nusair2 Comments

Location: 2901 Bayview Avenue, Toronto
Website: http://originnorth.com/

Claudio Aprile recently opened the latest in his burgeoning chain of Origin restaurants, this one right next to Bayview Village. I took this as an excuse (like I needed one) to finally try their much-ballyhooed burger — among other accolades, Toronto Life called it the 13th best burger in the city.

Aprile obviously has very high hopes for this location; it’s a ridiculously enormous, cavernous space. There’s no middle ground here. It’s either going to be a huge hit for Aprile, or a very high profile flop.

However, if he can keep serving food of this caliber, he has a lot less to worry about.

Though it’s certainly not Toronto’s cheapest burger at 17 bucks (with fries or a salad), in this case you get what you pay for.

They don’t advertise the size of the patty on the menu, but it’s fairly substantial — I’d guess at least eight ounces.

It’s a great quality burger. Seriously, seriously good. For one thing, it’s obviously made with sufficiently fatty beef, and is really juicy. This doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but when you eat as many depressingly lean, way-too-dry burgers as I do, it’s like manna from heaven.

The juiciness and the lack of any meatloaf-esque ingredients is enough for me to give this burger a solid thumbs up. But the flavour is also pretty great, with a really complex, satisfyingly beefy taste. It’s always a pleasure to eat a burger at a restaurant where the chef actually takes care to source the beef he uses in his hamburger.

It’s topped, as per the menu, with “avocado + smoked mayo + arugula.” You don’t find too many burgers topped with avocado, and I’m not sure why. I wouldn’t want it on a griddle-cooked, fast food-style patty, but it’s perfectly suited for a more substantial burger like this one. Its creaminess and mild flavour are a perfect fit for this particular style of hamburger.

The smoky mayo and peppery arugula also compliment the burger pretty darn well, as does the fresh, soft yet substantial bun. It’s very easy for the bun to be an afterthought, but it clearly isn’t here.

So what’s the deal? Is this a perfect burger? Sadly, no. Though it didn’t appear to be, and it is cooked to a perfect medium rare, the outside of the burger is a bit over-charred, giving it a slight acrid bitterness. It’s not too strong, fortunately, so I was still able to enjoy the hell out of this hamburger — but it’s there, marring what could otherwise be on a shortlist of the best burgers in the city.

Maybe this was just a one-off mistake. Maybe it’s something that almost never happens. I don’t know. Sadly, I’m not a professional reviewer, and I don’t have the luxury of visiting a restaurant multiple times. I can only review the burger I was served that day, and that’s what I was served.

As for the fries, they were truly outstanding. No caveats here: just perfectly cooked, amazingly flavourful fries. Good stuff.

Gangster Burger

Published on July 14, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 607 Queen Street West, Toronto
Website: http://www.gangsterburger.com/

Gangster Burger opened about a year ago, and at the time a lot of discussion was centered around the alleged tastelessness of the restaurant’s name and general theme; people were complaining that the theme was a celebration of thugs and murderers. This really does not bother me. For all I care you can name your restaurant Evil Burger and sell Hitler Hamburgers and Pol Pot Poutine — if it’s good, I’ll be eating there with a smile on my face. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

The furor eventually died down (Führer French Fries — another item I’d eat at Evil Burger. Okay, I’ll stop now) , which only leaves one thing: are the hamburgers any good?

Let me get one thing out of the way first. I’m not generally too perturbed about such things, but the ambiance here was horrifically, disastrously bad. Hindenburg bad. It’s a tiny little restaurant; probably about the size of the original Burger’s Priest, maybe a tad bigger. I came on a hot summer’s day, and it was immediately apparent that “air conditioning” is not a phrase in this restaurant’s vocabulary. It was hot. And I don’t just mean a little bit toasty. It had to have been a good 15, 20 degrees hotter in there than it was outside. It was an inferno.

Oh, the humanity.

You know when it gets really hot and they say that youths and the elderly are at risk? Don’t bring those people here on a hot day, because they will pass out. By the time I got my hamburger (an excruciatingly long twenty minute wait) I was quite literally soaked in sweat.

Between the heat and the aggressively loud hip-hop being blasted over the speakers, you’ve got an environment that pretty much defines the word unpleasant. At a certain point I was legitimately thinking about just getting out of there sans-burger, despite the fact that I had already paid. It was a horror show.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let me talk about the burger. It’s smashed and griddle-cooked a la Burger’s Priest, by a sweaty chef who kept wiping his perspiration-soaked face with his sleeve. Let’s put it this way: come here on a hot day and I can pretty much guarantee that some of the salt in the burger and fries will be from the chef’s sweat.

Appetizing, I know!

As I mentioned earlier, the burger took an agonizing twenty minutes to be ready. The wait seems to be due to the fact that, bafflingly, they only cook two or three burgers at a time, despite the fact that they have a fairly enormous griddle to work with. I guess the sweaty chef can only keep track of a couple of patties at once.

The burger came with a bit of a crust and looking fairly promising. I’m willing to walk over hot coals for a delicious burger, so if the burger was good, even after the misery of waiting in that restaurant, I probably would have been back.

That is thankfully not an issue I’ll ever have to deal with.

I could tell just by looking at the uncooked beef that it was too lean. And lo and behold, when I took a bite of the well done burger it was very, very dry. It was also a bit too tightly packed, resulting in a burger that required a fair amount of chewing power.

The flavour of the beef was fine. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. It had a meh, nothing flavour that is typical of so-so quality meat.

I got the Don C burger, which is no-frills with just lettuce, tomato, and your choice of sauce. I went with the Gangster Goo (which has to win a prize for the most unappetizing sauce name ever), which is just spicy ketchup.

The bun was fine, though it was a bit on the dry side and a bit too big.

I hadn’t ordered any fries, though they gave me some anyway as an apology for the long wait. They weren’t bad. They had a decent flavour and seemed like they could have been above average, but they were very soggy.

All in all the burger here isn’t horrible, but it’s so aggressively mediocre that I couldn’t possibly foresee any scenario in which I would recommend it, unless you are an aficionado of loud hip-hop and sweating profusely. But even then, I’d say just get a burger from either Burger’s Priest or White Squirrel (which are not even a five minute walk away, making this place completely redundant) and then head over to your nearest sauna.