burger fail – Tasty Burgers

Turtle Jack’s

Published on December 22, 2019December 22, 2019 by Michael Nusair5 Comments

Location: 108 Courtneypark Drive East, Toronto
Website: https://turtlejacks.com/

Nope.

Seriously: no. I’m so sick of the no-effort pucks of despair that they serve at basically every Canadian chain restaurant like Turtle Jack’s.

How? How does this happen? How can a restaurant serve a hamburger that’s so unambiguously bad that anyone with a mouth and functional tastebuds will immediately identify it as the off-putting garbage that it is?

That’s a legitimate question and I’d like someone at Turtle Jack’s to answer it. Also, Turtle Jack’s? While you’re here? Get out of here with that horrific slop. Get all the way out and never come back.

The burger at Turtle Jack’s is incredibly dry and dense, and it’s an absolute bummer to eat. It made me sadder and sadder with each mouthful. The beefy flavour was almost nonexistent, with a vaguely leftovery funk that makes me think they might be precooking the patties and reheating them to order. It’s bad. Bad bad bad bad bad.

I feel no need to discuss it further, because it’s a piece of garbage that’s clearly made by people with the cynical belief that they can serve whatever the hell garbage they want and people will eat it. If you order it, you’re proving them right. Please don’t do that. I ate it so you don’t have to.

The fries were slightly better (because there’s really nowhere to go but up from that burger), but they were the boringest of boring frozen fries.

1 out of 4

Wallflower

Published on November 25, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

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.

Wallflower

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.

Wallflower

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.

Wallflower

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.

0.5 out of 4

The Loose Moose

Published on October 28, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 146 Front Street West, Toronto
Website: https://theloosemoose.ca/

The Loose Moose isn’t part of a chain (though it is owned by SIR Corp, the restaurant conglomerate behind places like Jack Astor’s, Canyon Creek, and Scaddabush), but it serves a prototypically lousy chain restaurant burger: it’s exceptionally dry, it features personality-free flavourless beef, and it’s just an absolute bummer to eat.

It’s the type of burger that gives burgers a bad name. I could see someone who doesn’t eat a lot of of them ordering this, eating it, and then thinking “oh, I guess I don’t like hamburgers then?” Because it’s so far removed from what makes a good burger so great that it’s almost like an entirely different dish. It’s unpleasant.

I got the Classic Burger, which is completely no-frills, topped only with lettuce, tomato, and pickle.

This is going to be brief, because if they’re not going to put any effort into making it, I shouldn’t have to put any effort into writing about it.

The griddled patty had a decent amount of crust, but it was cooked way past well done, it was too finely ground, and it was just the driest thing in the history of dry. It was brutal. The flavour was fine, I guess (it was inoffensive, at least) but it was so incredibly dry that having to actually eat it was such a chore.

The toppings were okay, as was the bun (though it was a bit too dense). Who cares, though? That stupid jerk of a patty needs to take a long walk off a short pier.

As for the fries, they were ultra-generic frozen fries. Because why not, right? The restaurant’s on a very high-traffic section of Front Street, so I guess it’ll be busy regardless of how the food actually tastes. So why not serve the most low-effort, cheapest garbage you can find? People will eat it regardless, apparently! It’s just good business. I have a certain amount of grudging respect for that. I just wish I didn’t have to suffer through eating there myself.

1 out of 4

The Belsize Public House

Published on August 19, 2018August 19, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 535 Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto
Website: https://thebelsize.pub/

As much as I love the griddle-smashed burgers that are so omnipresent in the GTA, it’s hard to resist a big, fat grilled burger. But it’s much, much harder to find a really good burger cooked in that style, so when I heard that they serve a tasty one at The Belsize Public House, I was all over it.

They have a couple of burgers on their menu; there’s the Hoser Burger, which features peameal bacon and cheddar, and the no-frills Grilled Burger, which comes topped with lettuce, tomato, and onion. As I’m wont to do, I went with the simpler of the two.

I’ve cut through so many burgers over the years that I can pretty much tell instantly if a burger is going to be iffy. This one was suspiciously difficult to saw in half, and the alarm bells were going off in my head. They were screaming.

As I feared, it wasn’t very good. The Belsize makes every mistake you can make to end up with an unsatisfying burger. Literally every single one: the beef was clearly too lean, the texture of the grind was way too fine, the beef had been overhandled and was too tightly packed, and it was cooked all the way to the tippy tippy top of well done (if not a little bit further). The meat was so dense. It was a punishingly tough chew. There was a vague amount of juiciness there, but not even close to enough to make any kind of impact.

The flavour wasn’t much better; aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure they had mixed salt and pepper right into the patty (it was distractingly peppery), the flavour of the beef was almost non-existent. And what little flavour there was tasted vaguely off. It wasn’t good.

The toppings were fine, and the fluffy bun was actually pretty perfect. That patty, though…

I will say that my dining companion had the jerk pork sandwich and really enjoyed it, and the fries and the coleslaw that came with the burger were both quite tasty. The fries, in particular, were seriously delicious, with an addictively crispy exterior and perfectly creamy interior. So it’s possible that everything else coming out of the kitchen is tasty. But they bungled that burger, and they bungled it hard.

1 out of 4

Marben — Round 2

Published on July 22, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Marben
Location: 488 Wellington Street West, Toronto
Website: http://www.marben.ca/

Yes, I’ve actually reviewed Marben before, back in 2013. Back then, they stuffed the patty with saucy braised short ribs, a practice that made me call that burger “less hamburger and more upscale sloppy joe.”

Now that they’ve started serving a more traditional burger with a regular un-stuffed beef patty, I figured a re-do was in order.

I was actually pretty excited to try it again. The burger is quite well regarded, and now that it’s an actual hamburger instead of an odd Frankenstein creation, I figured it would be delicious. I was all set for burger greatness.

I guess I should have left well enough alone. As it turns out, the whole stuffing thing was actually hiding the burger’s deficiencies, which are now in plain view. To paraphrase the late, great Roger Ebert: I hated hated hated hated hated this burger. It was so bad.

It’s basically the same burger it was before, but with braised brisket on top instead of short rib in the middle. From the menu: “beef fat brioche, aged cheddar, branston pickle, braised brisket.”

I’m going to cut right to the chase: the patty itself was horrible. I’ve had a lot of overly dry burgers since starting this blog, and this might have been the most egregiously, ridiculously, unpleasantly Sahara dry. I don’t think there was an ounce of moisture in it, despite only being cooked to a nice rosy-pink medium.

I don’t know what cut of beef they’re using in this thing, but it’s obviously all wrong. It’s one of those burgers that’s so dry, as you’re chewing it you’re wondering, “how am I even going to swallow this??” The waiter must have refiled my water about five times, because I had to keep drinking and drinking and drinking just to keep my mouth from completely drying out.

The beef was also too finely ground; combined with the dryness, the texture was a complete nightmare. It made me want to hurl the burger across the restaurant, run out, and then never eat or review a hamburger again.

I was wondering if this was just a one-off issue, but the fact that the burger wasn’t even cooked past medium and was still this insanely dry (not to mention the overly fine grind) makes me think that they’re using beef that’s way, way, way too lean and then preparing it poorly.

The flavour was okay, at least — not particularly beefy, but pleasant enough. But with that texture, it didn’t matter.

Everything else was fine, I guess. The brisket was okay, but like the patty, it was dry — there will be absolutely no mistaking this version of the burger for a sloppy joe. The other toppings were good, though the cheddar was so sparingly applied that if I hadn’t seen it, I would have never known it was there.

The bun was dry too, because why the hell not, right?? I’ve had worse, but I think it might have either been slightly overbaked or a day or two past its prime.

The fries were great, though. So there’s that at least.

1 out of 4