burger fail – Page 5 – Tasty Burgers

Toma Burger Addiction

Published on January 26, 2014January 26, 2014 by Michael Nusair4 Comments

Location: 712 Queen Street West, Toronto
Website: http://toma-burgeraddiction.com/

I am confounded. Toma Burger Addiction confounds me. This is a burger place that, somehow, gets almost every single element of their hamburger completely wrong. Even if you were trying to make the ultimate mediocre hamburger, I don’t think you could succeed quite as brilliantly as Toma Burger Addiction has.

I will say that the design of the restaurant is quite nice. Bright, spacious, and handsomely designed, it’s actually one of the more inviting-looking burger joints I’ve visited for this blog.

Unlike a lot of burger places in the city, it’s a sit-down restaurant. The service was fine; another non-food-related plus in this restaurant’s favour.

They have about a dozen burger choices on the menu. I went with The Classic, which comes topped with “Angus beef, cheddar, caramelized onions, pickles, arugula, tomato, Toma secret sauce.”

They don’t specify how big the patty is, but I’d guess it’s about six ounces. It’s not very good. Though it’s not particularly dry (which is nice), the texture is off. It’s ever-so-slightly mushy, and kind of sausagey.

There’s definitely some kind of seasoning mixed into the beef, which doesn’t help. I also think it’s ground a little bit too finely. It’s off. It’s weird.

The patty has a muddled flavour that, just like the texture, is a little bit off. It’s nothing that’ll make you pound your fist onto the table and decry the state of humanity; it’s perfectly edible, it just doesn’t taste right. There’s no real beefy flavour. There’s no flavour of anything, in particular. It’s muddled. I don’t know. It was weird. It was off-putting in a way that I can’t exactly put my finger on.

The bun, on the other hand, was clearly disastrous. It was quite possibly the worst bun I’ve ever had on a hamburger. As soon as I saw it, I knew I was probably in trouble. It looks dense and impenetrable. Cutting into it confirmed my suspicions; it was thick and unyielding and surprisingly difficult to saw in half.

Impossibly dense and sugary sweet, it was completely overwhelming and should not be allowed within fifty feet of a hamburger patty. Of all the things that are confoundingly bad about this burger, the bun is clearly the most baffling. I honestly cannot think of a worse bun for a burger. It’s just so chewy and doughy and intensely flavoured. It’s actually kind of insane how terrible it is. It’s like someone took a pretzel bun, soaked it in sugar water and then left it out in the sun until they were satisfied that it had reached a properly brick-like consistency.

The condiments don’t fare much better. The mushy, colourless caramelized onions look and taste as though they’ve been boiled. Granted, I’m not a professional chef, but I’m fairly certain that caramelized onions are supposed to be caramelized.

The Toma sauce was mostly just sweet and uninspired. It’s only been a few hours since I ate this burger, and I already forget what it tasted like. If only I could forget the rest of the burger quite so easily, but I fear it will be haunting my nightmares for weeks to come.

As for the fries, they were actually really good. Thinly cut and perfectly cooked, they would have easily been the bright spot of the meal — but not only were they not served hot, they weren’t served warm. They were room temperature. Because why ruin the perfect storm of mediocrity, right?

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.

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!)

The Lakeview

Published on May 5, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 1132 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Website: http://thelakeviewrestaurant.ca/

The Lakeview was just featured on the popular Food Network show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, which probably explains why it was so packed when I checked it out on a recent Sunday afternoon. Though the burger wasn’t one of the items sampled by Guy Fieri, I figured I’d give it a shot.

This, it turns out, was a blunder. If you go to a restaurant featured on that show, you should probably get what Guy gets. Or, just skip The Lakeview altogether. That’ll work too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Why should you skip The Lakeview? Read on, friend. Read on.

The Lakeview was originally opened in 1932, and its charmingly retro diner decor is probably the best thing about it. I think it’s likely a big reason for its inclusion in DDD.

They have a few burgers on the menu, but as per my general policy, I went with the namesake item: The Lakeview, topped with “Peameal, Melted Cheddar, Grilled Portobello, Onion Ring + Fixings.”

It took a while to arrive (like I said, the place was packed), but it came looking impressively large and fairly appealing. A big red flag went up when I struggled to cut it in half; my knife was just barely sharp enough to make it through the despairingly tough patty.

Still, I took a bite hoping for the best; the burger quickly took those hopes, smashed them against the wall and stomped on them for good measure. This was not a tasty burger.

The first thing that hit me? Not only is this a meatloaf burger, it’s an especially meatloafy meatloaf burger. The spices and whatever other junk they mix in there completely knock you back. I honestly don’t even think they should be allowed to call this a hamburger. It is a meatloaf sandwich, plain and simple.

If you served this “hamburger” to an American, they’d laugh in your face. Here’s an analogy that I think pretty much sums it up: the Lakeview’s burger is to a real, American-style hamburger what chop suey is to real Chinese food. It is imitation; a photocopy of a photocopy.

That’s not to say that an imitation can’t be tasty. A meatloaf sandwich can be perfectly delicious. This, however, was not.

It was absurdly dry, for one thing. Make sure you’ve got a big glass of water handy when you eat this, because it’ll suck the moisture right out of your mouth. The patty is way too tightly packed, too lean, and overcooked. The grilled burger was also over-charred and blackened in spots. Burger jerky, essentially.

I normally like my burgers sparsely topped, and this is the opposite of that. In this case, however, the myriad of toppings are a godsend; they’re the only things keeping your mouth lubricated against the assault of the mouth-drying patty.

Between the peameal bacon, the cheddar, the onion ring, and the mushroom (not to mention the lettuce, tomato, and pickle) there is a hell of a lot going on here. Unlike the burger at The Samuel J. Moore, however, the toppings are good and the flavours all meld together in a somewhat cohesive fashion, so that was good at least. The toppings didn’t taste bad, I’ll give it that. But they still weren’t enough to save the insipid patty.

The sesame seed bun bun was too wide for the task at hand, resulting in a fair amount of bun remaining after the patty was but a memory. The dry bun was also a bit more on the stale side than I would have liked.

The burger came with a side of fries and a salad. The salad had clearly been dressed far too long in advance, and was vaguely mushy and kind of horrible. The fries, on the other hand, were surprisingly decent and easily the highlight of the meal.

I will note that my dining companion had one of the items featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives (the freedom toast — essentially a peameal grilled cheese sandwich with French toast for bread), which he quite enjoyed. So if you absolutely have to go to the Lakeview, stick with what Guy ate; if someone offers you the burger, run screaming in the other direction.

The Samuel J. Moore

Published on March 24, 2013June 29, 2014 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 1087 Queen Street West, Toronto
UPDATE: The restaurant is closed, apparently. Can’t say I’m too surprised.
Website: https://www.facebook.com/TheSamuelJMoore

The Samuel J. Moore just opened a few weeks ago, and the early word is that they’ve got a burger worth eating. Obviously, I had to give it a shot.

I came at around noon on a Saturday during brunch service. I was hoping to get the regular hamburger off the dinner menu, but sadly, only the Brunch Burger was available.

Before I get into the less-than-great things about the place, I will say that the design of the restaurant is quite nice. Spacious, with a classy old-school diner aesthetic and lots of sunlight streaming in from the windows, it’s certainly a pleasant enough place to have a relaxing meal.

And when the burger came, it looked pretty darn good. This is a place that seemed to have it all figured out — or so I thought, until I actually took a bite.

The Brunch Burger comes topped with a fried egg, peameal bacon, smoked cheddar, and coleslaw. There are a lot of flavours here, and sadly, they never coalesce into anything particularly satisfying.

It looks good, though, doesn’t it?

But let me talk about the patty, because that’s really where this burger takes a wrong turn and never comes back. Finely ground,densely packed, overly lean, and cooked all the way to the tippy-top of well done, it’s a perfect storm of density and dryness.

The patty also has a distinct lack of beefiness that was so pronounced I felt compelled to ask my server if it was all beef, or some kind of beef/pork blend. It’s all beef, apparently, so I’m not sure how to account for its almost complete lack of beefy flavour. It didn’t taste bad, at least. It just tasted like nothing. Chewy, tough nothing.

Of course, I was only able to discern this in the bites I took of the patty alone, because this is a hamburger with a lot going on. The dominant flavour is the peppery, tangy coleslaw, which is surprisingly spicy and completely inappropriate as a topping for a hamburger. It might have been okay on its own, but as a condiment it is ridiculously overpowering and tragically misguided.

The somewhat dry, tough peameal bacon also didn’t do the burger any favours.

The fried egg, however, was perfectly cooked with a satisfyingly runny yolk. It couldn’t do much to save the burger, but it was nice. The fresh, toasted brioche bun was also pretty great, and definitely deserved to be part of a better burger.

And I guess there was cheddar in there, too, but with all the other stuff going on I honestly couldn’t even taste it.

The burger also came with a side of perfunctory hash browns and bland house-made ketchup. They were on par with the burger, which is to say not good.