Gourmet Burger Kitchen, review

AS FERGAIL Sharkey almost said, a good burger these days is hard to find. So many god-awful chains exist in the burgersphere that you can forgive people for thinking that a flattened disc of eyes, teeth and testicles constitutes the best of the genre.

As the saying goes, you can’t flame grill a turd.

But there are burger establishments that position themselves at the higher end, certainly by price. Some, such as Hard Rock Cafe, actually do a pretty good job when it comes to burgers. Others, like TGI Friday, charge more than a tenner but refuse to cook them any less than medium, effectively pandering to the same mass market as the popular takeaways, but on a night out instead of a drive-thru.

Gourmet Burger Kitchen, or GBK as it’s also known, is one of those ‘casual dining’ chains that seems to end up in every city centre in the UK and sits in between the higher and lower echelons of the burger world. It’s one of those places that perpetuates the myth that ‘mayo’ is actually a word.

The Spinningfields branch was desperately quiet (ie. totally empty) when I paid a visit with my daughter on a wet Monday lunchtime. The enthusiastic service staff didn’t let that dampen their mood though, and were particularly good at sorting Daisy out with crayons, puzzles and so forth.

The kids menu offered a good range, and at four courses for £6.25 (including Fab lolly), good value too. A milkshake arrived and was duly demolished at speed, as did a generous mini-portion of tasty fish and chips.

Adults have a dizzying array of options to choose from, pretty much involving an entire farmyard’s worth of meat. I plumped for a habanero burger (£8.45), which promised ‘hot and spicy sauce’.

There was plenty of that, no question. Sadly, it was presented as a puddle on the plate, which the burger had then been sat in, like a cow in a shallow bath.

This could mean only one thing; sticky fingers. Some people may like the idea of having to wipe their hands every 10 seconds whilst eating lunch. I am not one of them.

It was a constant battle against the thick, luminous red sauce, which totally covered the bottom half of my bun and just got everywhere. The burger squirted out of the bun because of the partially melted mozzarella; it was like trying to hold back the tide with a sheet of blotting paper.

Was the burger nice? I suppose so, but I was so bloody distracted by the sauce I stopped caring. I will say this – you get a lot of chips with your burger, which is just as well, because the limp, vinegary coleslaw (£3) is a total disaster. The tri-taster dipping sauces, three small paper ramekins for an eye-watering £3.35, are deeply uninspiring too, and the sides can really bump up the bill.

Given that my dining companion was four, after we’d had a drink each the bill came to nearly £30. That’s an awful lot for a lunch for one and a half people.

If you want a good burger, you could definitely do a lot worse than GBK. But maybe order the sauce on the side.