burger fail – Page 4 – Tasty Burgers

Food Cabbie

Published on September 28, 2014September 28, 2014 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: It’s a truck, so check Twitter to see where they’re parked
Website: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Food-Cabbie/137387466356927

Food Cabbie is one of those places I’ve been meaning to check out almost since I started this blog. As one of the earlier food trucks in Toronto’s recent food truck boom, they obviously have staying power, which you’d think would indicate they’re serving up some pretty good food.

You’d think.

They have a few burgers on the menu: quarter pound, half pound, and a chili burger dubbed the L.A. Tommy Burger.

If it weren’t for this review, I wouldn’t have ordered anything. I would have gotten the hell out of there posthaste. My dining companion ordered first; he got the L.A. Tommy, and since we could see the man doing the cooking, we could clearly see him pull out the saddest looking pre-cooked burger I’ve ever seen and slap it on the griddle.

I suddenly got PTSD-esque flashbacks to BBQ Express, an experience I was doing my best to completely erase from my memory. Like with that burger, every bone in my body was telling me to high-tail it out of there and never look back, but you know what? My self-imposed burger blogging duties mean I have to take the bad with the good. I’m here to eat this garbage so you don’t have to. I’m here to jump on that grenade for you.

I steeled myself and ordered the quarter pound burger.

It comes topped with mayo and tomato, with further condiments available on a picnic table just next to the truck. I figured I’d keep it simple and eat the burger as it comes.

I just… I don’t… What.

I think it might have been a frozen patty, but I honestly couldn’t tell because it wasn’t quite like any other pre-fab burger that I’ve had; it was worse. It certainly looked like a frozen burger, but… Everything about it was wrong.

I’m not sure if it was the reheating or what, but it was just awful on every level. I don’t even know what to make of the texture, which had that chewy, hot-doggy texture typical of frozen burgers, but which was also horrifically mushy. Like, I’m not even sure how to describe that texture, other than to say it was horrible, and — I’m pretty sure — mere steps away from triggering my gag reflex.

The taste wasn’t much better. Acrid and burnt around the edges, it had a gamy, downright nasty flavour that, at the very least, was somewhat disguised by how incredibly salty it was. I’ve obviously never eaten cat food, but this is what I’d imagine it would taste like if you mashed some Fancy Feast into a patty and griddled it.

It’s one of the worst hamburgers I’ve ever had. It’s certainly right down there with Hero Certified Burgers, which I didn’t even think was possible. Like with that burger, I couldn’t finish it (an exceedingly rare occurrence for me). I got a bit more than half-way through and I just couldn’t stomach another bite.

I actually feel kind of bad. I felt no remorse whatsoever ripping into Hero Burger, a soulless corporation whose modus operandi is to fleece Canadians by using slick marketing and sheer omnipresence to trick them into buying a shoddy (at best) product. I only gave them what they had coming.

Food Cabbie, on the other hand, seems to be a mom and pop operation. No one opens a food truck to get rich; these are people who, presumably, wanted to share their food with the city, and thought they could make a living doing so. That’s what makes the complete lack of care in the food they’re serving so baffling. I’m honestly quite confused by it, but I can only comment on the food I was served that day, which was atrocious.

And the sad fact of the matter is, this burger was so thoroughly horrible on every level that it’s very difficult to speculate that they were just having a bad day. It was bad food, period.

They must have been serving something worth eating at some point, otherwise I don’t see how they could possibly survive in the GTA’s ever-expanding food truck scene, but those days are clearly long gone.

As for the fries, they were almost as bad as the burger. Pale, with a soggy, grease-soaked exterior and a chalky, undercooked interior, they joined what was left of the burger in the garbage.

Yikes.

0 out of 4

Sonny’s Drive-In

Published on August 2, 2014 by Michael Nusair1 Comment

Location: 21 Kennedy Road North, Brampton
Website: http://www.sonnysdrivein1964.com/

Sonny’s Drive-In — a small, rickety old take-out joint — is absolutely dripping with old-school charm. It is lousy with it. Though in other cities that might fill you with a warm fuzzy feeling, visiting an old-school burger joint in the GTA is pretty much a guarantee of two things:

1) The burgers will be grilled. I have no idea why, but prior to the rise of places like Burger’s Priest and Holy Chuck a few years ago, griddled burgers were exceptionally difficult to find in the GTA (aside from fast food chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s). Everyone grilled their burgers.

2) This is the thing that always makes me hesistant to check out old-school burger joints: the burgers being served will almost certainly be of the frozen, industrially-produced variety. Or if you’re lucky and the burger is freshly made, it’ll inevitably be a meatloaf burger.

Number two is what makes it impossible for me to feel anything but trepidation when I visit an old-school burger joint, and makes me seriously confused as to how these places stay in business. I think it’s safe to say that nostalgia plays a very strong role.

Before I bury the lede much further: yes, Sonny’s serves a frozen burger. No, it is not good.

It’s a tiny little place that does mostly take-out business — there are four picnic tables outside, but aside from that seating is non-existent. The burgers can either be had plain, with cheese, or with bacon and cheese. I went plain and had mine topped with pickles, tomato, and mayo.

Accuse me of snobbery all you want, but cheap frozen burgers like the ones they serve here (and these are seriously bottom of the barrel) barely even taste like a hamburger to me. I’ve mentioned this before, but with their rubbery texture and generically salty flavour, they taste more like a flattened hot dog than like a hamburger. They’re bad.

The toppings were fine, though the mayo was actually Miracle Whip or something similar. The bun was pretty good, though when it’s part of such a shoddy hamburger, who cares?

As for the fries, they were much better than the burger, though that’s not saying much. They were soggy and a bit undercooked, but otherwise pretty good. They were also completely unsalted, which is a bit of a bummer coming from a take-out place.

The Gabardine

Published on June 29, 2014June 29, 2014 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 372 Bay Street, Toronto
Website: http://www.thegabardine.com/

The list giveth, and the list taketh away. I am referring, of course, to Toronto Life’s list of the 25 best burgers in the city, which seems to be guiding quite a few of my burger choices recently. I had a pretty awful experience at that list’s number 23 restaurant, The Queen and Beaver, which made me wary of its choices. The Harbord Room was much, much better, however. This made me much more inclined to trust the list.

I’m wary again. Boy, that list is hit-and-miss. Yikes.

The Gabardine is, bizarrely, closed on the weekends, which might be why it’s taken me so long to check it out. It’s a fairly small room, but it’s cozy, and they seem to be doing well.

The burger, as per the menu: “sirloin bacon cheeseburger with aioli, tomato, lettuce & fries.”

I’ve mentioned it before, but sirloin is an absurd cut of beef to make a hamburger out of. I know why some restaurants do it, because it sounds fancy — hey, sirloin is steak, right? It must be good!

Well, no. Sirloin is super lean, and pretty much all of a burger’s juiciness comes from fat. No fat = dry burger.

To the Gabardine’s credit, they at least don’t cook the burger all the way to well done, which would absolutely guarantee that a burger made from beef as lean as sirloin will be dry. The grilled burger I received was cooked to medium, with a little bit of pink in the middle; this helped negate some of the dryness. It was still quite dry, no doubt about it, but they at least tried to serve up something worth eating.

Much, much more problematic was the burger’s texture. It was finely ground to an almost criminal extent, giving it a dense, oddly mealy texture that I found quite unappealing. It was as if they ran the beef through a meat grinder, and then ran it through again. Then again, then again. Then one more time. Then, hey, what the heck, once more, let’s make sure it has the most off-putting texture possible. Between that and the lean beef, this was a burger that required a lot of chewing. I felt like a spittoon should have been provided.

It tasted okay, but with the abundant, sharp cheddar and the salty bacon, there was zero flavour from the beef. Like, none at all. The cheddar flavour so thoroughly dominated the weakly-flavoured beef that it was like chewing on some kind of beef/cheese hybrid. It was like science had created a new substance that has the texture of beef, but the taste of cheese.

I liked the bun, I’ll say that. Very delicately crispy on the outside, but fresh, soft and pliant on the inside, it was pretty great. If it could talk, it would have expressed its sadness to be part of such a sub-par burger, but it’s okay: I don’t blame you, bun. You did your best. You brought your A-game.

Also bringing their A-game? The fries. Man, those were good fries. I’m baffled as to how the same kitchen puts out fries that great and a burger that middling. The universe is mysterious.

The Queen and Beaver Public House

Published on June 1, 2014June 14, 2014 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 35 Elm Street, Toronto
Website: http://queenandbeaverpub.ca/

The burger at the Queen and Beaver is… different. My dining companion noted that my brow was furrowed for pretty much the entire time I was eating it, which is true. It’s an odd one. I don’t know how to classify it.

The Queen and Beaver has actually been on my radar for a while now, at least since Toronto Life included it on their list of the best burgers in Toronto back in 2012.

It’s a cozy restaurant with food that’s a bit more ambitious than standard pub fare. This ambition extends to the burger, and sadly, I think their reach exceeds their grasp.

The patty is hand chopped, which means that instead of putting the beef through a grinder like with a traditional hamburger, it’s chopped by hand until the resultant bits are small enough to be formed into a patty.

It’s odd. The waitress informed me that they suggest medium rare, which was fine by me, that being my preference and all. And the grilled patty was cooked to a perfect medium rare, but… it didn’t taste like a hamburger. The hand-chopped patty was formed out of discernibly large chunks of beef, with the effect being that the whole thing tasted like bits of steak that had been mashed into the shape of a hamburger.

Honestly, I’m loathe to even call it a hamburger — it tastes more like a steak sandwich. But if it looks like a burger, is called a burger, and has appeared on a list of the best burgers in Toronto… I guess it’s a hamburger, or at least I should treat it as such.

Sadly, whatever it is, it’s pretty much ruined by an extreme case of over-seasoning. Along with the bits of steak, there are onions, spices, and something else with a very strong flavour added into the mix (Worcestershire sauce? HP? I’m not sure). Whatever it is, it is very, very strong. They are presumably using good quality beef (the steep $18 dollar price tag would certainly indicate this), but thanks to all the junk they’ve got mixed in there, it doesn’t have even one iota of beefy flavour. Maybe it’s a hamburger and maybe it’s a steak sandwich, but either one of those without any beefy flavour is unquestionably a failure.

It comes topped with some thickly sliced bacon which, though it tastes pretty good, is mushy and quite possibly the least crispy bacon I’ve ever had. There wasn’t even a hint of crispiness — it may as well have been boiled. Cheese was proffered, but I elected to go without (and I’m glad I did — there’s already more than enough going on here without adding another flavour to further muddle things).

The fresh sesame seed bun was quite good, I’ll give it that. Kinda sad that the best thing I have to say about this hamburger is that the bun is good, but here we are. Suffice it to say, I disagree with Toronto Life’s assertion that this is one of the best burgers in Toronto. I doubt it would be in my top 100, let alone top 25.

The fries were tasty, however. Thickly cut and maybe a touch underdone, they were otherwise quite good.

Tilted Kilt

Published on February 9, 2014February 18, 2014 by Michael Nusair1 Comment

Location: 157 York Blvd, Richmond Hill
Website: http://www.tiltedkilt.com/

The Tilted Kilt is basically a Hooters knockoff — it’s got lots of TVs playing whatever sporting event happens to be on at the moment, and of course, lots of busty, very cleavage-y waitresses for the clientele to gawk at.

I don’t know if it’s even fair for me to shine too bright of a light on the food, because let’s face it — food isn’t high on the list of reasons that people come here. And while the discussion of whether a place like this is completely misogynistic or just harmless fun is certainly a conversation worth having, this is a burger blog, so… let’s forget about that and talk about the burger.

They have a handful of hamburgers on the menu, but the BBQ Bacon Cheeseburger is the only one labeled as a signature item, so that’s what I got. It’s topped with “Applewood smoked bacon, cheddar cheese, crispy shoestring onions and Guinness BBQ sauce.”

The patty is promisingly described on the menu as being made from their “choice butcher’s blend” and “always fresh,” so I had hopes that it would perhaps be a bit better than your standard chain fare. These hopes were quickly dashed, but it was a nice thought.

The burger was grilled (though perhaps incinerated is a better word) and was cooked about as far past well done as a burger can get and still be served in good conscience.

It didn’t have that telltale rubbery texture that you tend to get from frozen patties, but it certainly tasted prefabricated.

And it was dry. Oh dear lord was it ever dry. It may have been the driest burger I’ve ever had; if not, it was certainly a strong contender. It was very tightly packed and super dense, which certainly didn’t help matters.

It had surprisingly little taste. There was a slight off beef flavour, and some acrid bitterness from the charred exterior, but mostly it just tasted like a big unpleasant hunk of tough, chewy nothing. Towards the end I was actually dreading each mouth-drying bite, but I soldiered on and I finished it. Partially because I was reviewing it, but mostly because I’m a glutton who will eat pretty much anything you put on a plate in front of me.

The burger also — oddly enough — had a funky, vaguely fishy aroma that made it all the more off-putting. That was a first.

This was labeled as a BBQ burger, and while I typically find BBQ sauce to be a little bit too overwhelming as a topping on a burger, they either applied it so sparingly that I couldn’t taste it, or they forgot it altogether.

There were also supposed to be crispy shoestring onions on there, but like the BBQ sauce they seemed to be missing in action. Normally I appreciate a sparsely-topped hamburger, but in this case the patty was so dry and horrible that these condiments were sorely missed.

The bacon and cheddar were both definitely present, and they were both fine, though they couldn’t do much to make this hamburger even remotely worth eating.

The bun was the sole bright point. Buttery, slightly sweet, and just dense enough to hold up to the burger without ever becoming overwhelming, it absolutely deserved to be a part of a better hamburger.

As for the fries, they were about on par with the burger — they were bland, cardboardy, and required gobs of ketchup to be even remotely edible.