restaurant – Page 14 – Tasty Burgers

On The Bun

Published on October 21, 2012March 23, 2018 by Michael Nusair1 Comment

Location: 5030 Maingate Drive, Mississauga
Website: None

I actually found out about On The Bun via an email from a reader of this blog, though whether he was just an anonymous customer or the owner of the joint is a matter of some debate. It doesn’t affect my review either way, but it is clear that I wouldn’t have discovered the place if it weren’t for that email; it’s brand new, and there is nary a trace of it on the internet.

It’s an unusually large restaurant (I don’t think finding a seat will ever be an issue here), and there was only one other customer when I visited on a Saturday afternoon. Clearly, word has yet to get out.

I ordered the hamburger combo with fries and a drink, which is a pretty good deal at less than ten bucks. The restaurant has a fairly typical setup — you order your burger, wait, then pick from the toppings behind the glass. I went with tomato, pickles, and mayo, and noticing that they didn’t have any plastic knives, asked for my burger to be cut in half.

That’s when something unusual happened: the owner of the place (who was manning the register and cooking up the burgers solo), noticing me taking pictures and asking for my burger cut in half, sussed out my identity as a blogger. That was a first. Thankfully it happened after my burger had been prepared, so I don’t have to worry that he paid my burger any special attention, knowing that I’d be reviewing it (not that I’m exactly the Toronto Star, but I suppose this will be the first word on the place on the internet).

He did, however, send over an order of masala fries, but that was the extent of any special treatment that I received.

That being said, hopefully you’ll trust the impartiality of my opinion when I say that it was a solid burger. It’s nothing I’d go crazy over, but you could certainly do worse.

The burger is cooked on a griddle, and unlike another Mississauga burger joint, Burger Factory, it has a decent amount of crust. This is always a good thing.

The beef itself had a decent flavour; it’s not the beefiest hamburger you’ll ever eat, but it’s reasonably flavourful. I think it’s seasoned with something other than salt and pepper (I couldn’t put my finger on what), but it’s subtle, so it’s not a big deal.

The meat had a slightly odd texture, like it was perhaps ground too finely. However, the well done burger was also quite juicy, which I definitely appreciated, and which was enough to allow me overlook any textural nitpicks.

The bun, on the other hand, is harder to overlook: dense, over-sized, and vaguely stale, it completely threw off the beef-to-bun ratio, and was constantly threatening to overwhelm the burger. In my conversation with the owner, he mentioned that he was eyeing a new bun supplier, which is definitely a good thing.

As for the fries, they were crispy, greasy, and delicious; they actually reminded me quite a bit of chip truck fries. The masala fries, with their addictively curry-tinged seasoning, were even better.

Union Social Eatery

Published on October 7, 2012October 7, 2012 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: http://www.unionsocial.ca/
Website: 6986 Financial Drive, Unit 6, Mississauga

While trying to figure out what burger to review next, I checked out Urbanspoon’s list of the top-rated burgers in Mississauga (an unimpressive list to be sure — if you think Toronto has a lack of really good burger joints, go to Mississauga and prepare to be horrified). The number three spot on that list was Union Social Eatery, a restaurant I hadn’t heard of. Though a high Urbanspoon ranking is generally a questionable gauge of quality, I decided to check the place out.

It’s basically a family-friendly pub, with an all-over-the-place menu that ranges from pub standbys like wings and nachos to Pad Thai and swordfish steaks.

The restaurant’s family-friendly status was in full display when I went, with a birthday party full of screeching, excited kids sitting a stone’s throw away from my table. That was a bit grating, but I can hardly fault the restaurant for that.

What I can fault the place for was the glacial service. There was exactly one waitress serving the entire restaurant, which was fairly busy for a Saturday afternoon. Naturally, this resulted in service that wasn’t exactly speedy. The waitress did her best given the circumstances, but the management never should have put her in that position.

So it wasn’t the best dining experience ever. Slow service + whooping, hollering children = me contemplating suicide.

But let’s talk about the food. When the waitress was finally able to make her way to my table, I ordered the U.F.O. (Union’s Fresh Original) Burger, which is advertised as coming with “ancho BBQ sauce and all the trimmings.” Though I generally find barbecue sauce to be a little bit overwhelming for a hamburger, I decided to get the burger as is.

A little while later (okay, a long while later), the burger came. “All the trimmings” turned out to be lettuce, tomatoes, and red onion (which I removed). There was also some kind of mayo/mustard-based sauce.

I’ve gotta hand it to the place, though my expectations weren’t too high, this was actually a pretty solid burger. Let me get the bad out of the way first: the grilled burger was cooked all the way to well done and then some, hitting the upper reaches of how much you can cook a hamburger before it hits the point of no return.

Miraculously, despite the hamburger’s borderline-overcooked, fully gray interior, it still managed to be quite juicy — meaning that the beef actually had a reasonable fat content. Too-lean beef is the norm in the GTA, so for this alone I was tempted to wander back into the kitchen and shake the chef’s hand.

The loosely packed patty also had a very pleasant, mildly beefy flavour. It wasn’t the beefiest burger I’ve ever had, but considering the caliber of the last few burgers I’ve reviewed, it was practically a revelation. It also had a bit of flavour from the grill, but not so much to overwhelm the beef.

The condiments, too, were pretty good. Though I feared that the barbecue sauce would overpower the burger, it was sparingly brushed onto the patty and gave the burger a mild tang while still making sure that the beef was the star of the show. The mayo, too, added creaminess without over-asserting itself.

The lettuce and tomatoes were fine, and the fresh, buttered-and-toasted bun complimented the burger quite well.

As for the fries, they were crispy, with a fluffy interior, and were kind of perfect.

I should note that the quality of the burger and fries doesn’t necessarily translate to all of the items on the menu; my dining companion had one of the flatbreads and was underwhelmed, commenting that it tasted like something he could have thrown together at home with leftovers.

Frankie’s

Published on September 23, 2012 by Michael Nusair7 Comments

Location: 994 Queen Street West, Toronto
Website: None

Frankie’s has apparently been around for 35 years. I say apparently because I had never heard of it before a few weeks ago, and it certainly appears to be a new restaurant. However, a review at blogTO (which is, oddly, the only thing that pops up when you Google this joint outside of sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon) claims that it is a years-old neighbourhood standby. Okay, if you say so, blogTO. I should really make some calls and do some research, but that sounds like a lot of work. What do I look like, a journalist?

Anyway, a place this mediocre really isn’t worth that much thought or effort. The restaurant’s sign hilariously proclaims that these are the “world’s best burgers.” They’re not even Queen Street’s best burgers.

The menu offers two different types of hamburgers: the Frankie’s Original, which the menu describes as having “100% Canadian beef and Frankie’s secret spices,” and the specialty burgers, advertised as being eight ounce burgers made from “Canadian chuck.”

I found it very odd that they advertised the cut of beef that went into the specialty burgers and not the Frankie’s Original, and I was leaning towards getting a specialty burger over the who-knows-what’s-in-it Frankie’s Original; however, the specialty burgers were all so condiment and topping-heavy that I thought I’d never even be able to taste the beef. So I went with a Frankie’s Original topped with my usual selections (pickles, tomato, and mayo).

A note about the restaurant itself, which is waitress service, so you’ll be sitting there a while: they have TVs on with the volume up. This isn’t a problem. They also have a working jukebox. This is a problem. I have no problem with a jukebox in theory, but when you’ve got the music coming from the jukebox on one side, and the noise coming from the TV on the other, it can get a bit cacophonous. A note to the owners of Frankie’s: please pick one or the other.

The service was relatively fast, at least. The hamburger is, as advertised, a meatloaf burger — though it is thankfully not too strongly seasoned. This allowed the flavour of the beef itself to come through, which, in this case, wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The beef had a fairly typical low-quality beef flavour: vaguely funky, and somewhat unpleasant. Though I’ve had worse, it certainly wasn’t anything I’d want to have again.

The patty also had an oddly mushy texture despite being cooked to well done; I’m thinking that the meat had been too finely ground, and perhaps even had a filler of some sort.

As for the toppings, the pickles were fine, but the tomatoes were mealy enough to warrant removal from my hamburger, and the mayo was not mayo. It was either Miracle Whip or some house-made concoction; it was cloyingly sweet and completely overwhelming. I scraped off as much as I could from the bun and the patty.

The fries were okay, but they were a little bit soggy and very greasy, with a stale oil flavour. It’s likely that they’re using oil that is not quite hot enough, and that needs to be changed.

Royal Meats Barbeque

Published on August 12, 2012 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 710 Kipling Avenue, Etobicoke
Website: http://www.royalmeats.ca/

I debated whether or not to even write this review. Royal Meats serves a burger that is, without question, untraditional. There’s a quote from an interview with Aaron Sorkin, of all people, that seems apropos:

Waitress: Our soup today is New England–style clam chowder. And a tuna burger is also available.

A tuna burger? That’s a phony hamburger.

Waitress: It’s really very nice!

You can’t just smash anything into a patty shape and call it a burger, a turkey burger, a tofu burger, a tuna burger.

Aaron Sorkin has a point (which is a sentence I never thought I’d write on this blog); I’m willing to accept that the burgers at a place like Goody’s or Woody’s are legitimate burgers, despite my belief that a true hamburger should be nothing but ground beef seasoned with salt and pepper, because they are at least made entirely out of beef. The ersatz burgers at Royal Meats, however, with their mixture of veal, pork, onions and other spices, are much harder to accept as a legitimate hamburger.

So the question is: do I review it? Is it hamburgery enough to warrant inclusion in this blog? If it were a tuna burger or a turkey burger, the answer would be much more straightforward; those are clearly not hamburgers, or at the very least are in a very different category than the burgers I review on this blog.

The Royal Meats burger, on the other hand, is close enough to a legitimate hamburger to straddle the line between faux burgers and the real deal.

But if it looks like a burger and it’s called a burger, then I suppose it’s fair game to judge it like a hamburger.

Royal Meats is a Balkan place, which helps to explain the unorthodox burger. They’ve got two of them on the menu: half pound, and one pound. I ordered the half pound, was given a pager that would go off when the burger was ready, and sat down. Several minutes later, my burger was ready; I got it topped with lettuce, tomato, and the house sauce– a reddish white spread that tastes of onions, peppers, and some kind of soft cheese.

Whether or not it’s a hamburger is up for debate, but it is tasty, there’s no doubt about that. Veal is generally fairly mild, so most of the flavour here comes from the pork, as well as the onions and seasonings mixed into the burger. It tastes more like a sausage flattened into a patty shape than a hamburger, but it’s definitely satisfying for what it is.

It’s also quite juicy, with a nice texture and a decent amount of flavour imparted from the grill. The bun, too, differs from a traditional hamburger. Called a lepinya bun, it’s denser and chewier than your typical hamburger bun, with a yeasty flavour that’s reminiscent of sourdough. It suits the burger well.

As for the unique house sauce, it would overpower a traditional burger, but this burger’s more assertive flavours easily stand up to this aggressive spread.

The lightly battered fries are clearly frozen, and they have a processed flavour that is strongly reminiscent of Pringles. They were decent enough, though I felt no need to finish them.

Going back to my original quandary, I now wonder how to rate this burger. Taken on its own merits, it probably deserves three out of four. It’s good. But as a hamburger, it’s kind of a failure (if it is a hamburger at all). This being a hamburger blog, I’m compelled to give this burger my lowest passing grade: two-and-a-half out of four.

Magoo’s

Published on July 15, 2012 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 4242 Dundas Street West, Etobicoke
Website: http://www.magoosburgers.com/

Magoo’s is another one of those neighbourhood joints that really packs them in; pretty much any time you go, the place will be filled with families, couples, and other locals looking for their burger fix. It’s been around since 1987, which makes it relatively new compared to old-school places like Apache or Johnny’s, but it’s still been around for more than long enough to develop a loyal following.

And, I’m sorry to say, like most old-school burger joints, it trades more on nostalgia than taste; it’s just not that good.

I ordered the Magourmet hamburger (which is their six ounce burger; there’s also a four ounce option on the menu) as a combo with fries and a soda, and it came up to about ten bucks.

The layout was much like most old-school burger joints; you order, then when the burger’s ready, you pick your toppings from behind the glass. I went with pickles, tomato, and Magoo Sauce, which the menu describes as “Mayo/Garlic.”

The grilled burger is meatloaf-style, with other stuff mixed in with the beef. It has a generic meatloaf burger taste; it essentially tastes like whatever spices they’ve mixed in, without much meaty flavour (if any). The lack of any beefy flavour is odd, because it’s not one of the stronger meatloaf burgers that I’ve had, which makes me think that the quality of the beef isn’t all that great.

It’s also surprisingly dry. They boast that they use “100% lean ground beef,” which I’m pretty sure isn’t even possible — and even if it were, it certainly isn’t something to be proud of in the context of a hamburger. Either way, it’s clear that the beef is too lean, resulting in an unpleasantly dry burger. It also had a somewhat unusual texture; I suspect that perhaps the beef has been ground too finely.

The toppings were fine. The Magoo Sauce was as advertised, and was a decent roasted garlic mayo. The dense, chewy bun, however, was far too substantial for the burger at hand, and completely threw off the bun-to-beef ratio.

As for the fries, they were fine. They were perfectly tasty, though there was nothing special or memorable about them.