Mississauga – Page 5 – Tasty Burgers

Master Steaks

Published on December 1, 2013 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 5895 Dixie Road, Mississauga
Website: http://mastersteaks.com/

The burger at Master Steaks, in theory, should be great. You’d think it would be. The place doubles as a butcher shop, serves mostly steaks, and boasts about their burgers being freshly ground. Promising, right? It all seems like it should add up to an above average burger. Seems, in this case, being the operative word.

Despite its steakhouse leanings, Master Steaks is set up like a fast food joint; the menu’s posted up on the wall, and once you order it’s no more than a few minutes before a tray with your food is in your hands.

I went with the Master Burger — a bacon double cheeseburger — and when it was ready I had it topped with my usual pickles, tomato, and mayo.

It only takes one bite for all that promise to sprout wings and fly right out the door.

For one thing, the grilled hamburger is an especially meatloafy meatloaf burger, with all the stuff they mix into the beef completely overwhelming the burger’s flavour profile. This being mostly a steakhouse, there’s a good chance that they’re using above-average quality beef, but with that slaps-you-in-the-face meatloaf flavour, who can tell? I’ve had meatball sandwiches with a more subtle flavour.

The meat is also a bit too finely ground, which gives the patty a bit of an off texture. And — surprise, surprise — it’s too lean, and the burger is subsequently on the dry side.

Seriously, Master Steaks: way to take my hopes and dreams, pin them to the ground and then beat them senseless. This burger should have been so good! What are you doing?

It’s a bacon cheeseburger; the mild cheddar cheese was fully melted and perfectly acceptable. The bacon, too, was fine. The bun was a tiny bit on the overly-bready side, but was okay. The mayo, however, was actually Miracle Whip (or something very similar), which really shouldn’t be interchangeable with mayonnaise despite looking identical.

As for the fries, they were undercooked. After tempting me with the prospect of a great steakhouse-quality burger and then serving me over-seasoned junk, why not kick me when I’m down, right?

Super Mack

Published on October 20, 2013November 3, 2013 by Michael Nusair1 Comment

Location: 5960 Dixie Road, Mississauga
Website: None

Last time I referred to Urbanspoon’s list of the best burgers in Mississauga, I wound up at Union Social Eatery, which was actually pretty decent. Since I was looking for a burger to check out during my lunch break at work, I decided to give Urbanspoon’s list another shot.

Super Mack is another old-school burger joint / diner that looks like all the other old-school diners in the city; seriously, did every casual restaurant in the ’70s look exactly the same?

I came at around noon and it was fairly busy, which tends to be a good sign. Like with every other restaurant of this ilk, you order, wait for your burger to be ready, then pick out some toppings from behind the glass.

I ordered the Super Mack burger as a combo, which comes with a generous order of fries and a small drink for under ten bucks, so at the very least it’s a good deal.

The eponymous Super Mack is a double bacon cheeseburger, and it is enormous. They advertise the patties as being a quarter pound each, but I think they’re even bigger than that. It’s a burger with heft, no doubt about it.

The grilled, slightly overdone patties have a very pronounced flame-broiled flavour. It’s a meatloaf burger, though the spicing is more subtle than many that I’ve had. It still doesn’t have much of a beefy flavour, which is a shame; whatever flavour the beef might have had is pretty much wiped out by the smokiness from the grill and the spices mixed into the patty.

It also has a vague sausage-like texture; between that and the spicing, the whole thing could pass for a sausage sandwich (albeit a mild sausage — a breakfast sausage maybe).

The condiments were fine and the fresh sesame seed bun was above average and held up nicely to the very substantial hamburger. I guess by the standards of old-school burger joints like this it could have been much worse, but I can’t say I’ll ever be back.

As for the fries, aside from having a bit of a stale oil flavour, they were above average.

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.

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.

Zet’s Restaurant

Published on March 10, 2013 by Michael Nusair2 Comments

Location: 6445 Airport Road, Mississauga
Website: http://www.zets.ca/

Zet’s is in a bit of an odd location (it’s close enough to Pearson to see the planes take off), but having heard a few good things about their burger, I knew that at some point I’d have to check it off the list.

It’s an endearingly run-down Greek diner that serves stuff like soulvaki and gyro, along with burgers and other diner stand-bys.

I walked in at around one on a Saturday afternoon and was happy to note that the place was absolutely packed, with a line going all the way back to the door; crowds this deep are generally a harbinger of good things to come. Generally.

The menu is on the wall above the grill. Noting an eponymous burger on the menu, I ordered that, along with a side of fries. A few minutes later I was asked what I wanted from the toppings behind the glass (I went with tomatoes, pickle, and mayo) and I was ready to go.

The Zet burger is a double with cheese and bacon, and with two fairly large patties, it’s not kidding around. Clearly, it is not for the weak of appetite.

The patties are frozen and industrially produced. If you are seeking a hamburger worth going out of your way for, turn back now. These are not the droids you’re looking for.

It is, however, a better-than-average frozen burger. It wasn’t nearly as rubbery and hot dog-esque as some frozen burgers tend to be, nor was it as funky and off-tasting as some others. Basically, it was pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to freezer-born burgers — but that is a very low water-mark indeed.

It still, of course, had that generically salty “this is meat?” flavour and hot doggy texture, but to a lesser degree than pretty much any other frozen burger that I’ve had. It was also nicely grilled, with the gooey mild cheddar and thickly-cut, smoky bacon doing their best to hide the patty’s deficiencies. It was probably the most I’ve enjoyed a frozen burger in quite a while, so props must go to Zet’s for successfully putting lipstick on a pig.

The other toppings were fine, as was the soft, fresh bun. It’s actually pretty sad that Zet’s isn’t working with better patties; their technique is obviously pretty great, so if they were starting with better quality meat, they could be serving something special. Oh well.

The fries, too, made me want to give Zet’s a pass. Crispy on the outside and pleasingly creamy on the inside, they were absolutely outstanding. Again, you can’t make fries this good unless you really know what you’re doing, so what’s the deal with the frozen burgers, Zet’s? What’s the deal?