Gourmet Burger Kitchen fail

I love a good burger. I'm not talking a Bird's Eye frozen job, cremated on the barbecue. A proper handmade chunky burger, well presented. So I was delighted to have the chance to eat at Gourmet Burger Kitchen last night on an impromptu visit to Cabot Circus in Bristol.

According to the review quotes on the window this was the best thing sinced sliced... er... buns. And I had enjoyed a GBK burger a few years previously, so all sounded good. As has previously been mentioned, I also love barbecue sauce so inevitably I went for the barbecue burger. I was told it featured their home made bbq sauce. That's great - I sometimes make my own with onions and various other goodies in it, and obviously it's better than stuff out of a catering pack.

When it came, it was a good burger, that I won't deny. But the barbecue sauce was foul. It was loaded with whole grain mustard, so much so that it was, to all intents and purposes, a mustard sauce. Okay, it was dark brown in colour, but the mustard totally overwhelmed it. This was an attempt to be clever-clever gone all wrong. The primary flavour in barbecue sauce is tomato. Yes, it has other piquant touches that make it a dark red (and I do include a touch of mustard in my homemade version), but the stuff I was given just didn't do the job.

Being suitably British (and short of time), I didn't complain, but I was deeply distressed.

While I'm at it, I noticed another fail on the menu. Their chilli burger had 'chilli sauce' on it. No, no, no. A gourmet chilli burger is smothered in good chilli con carne. This was not the real thing.

As an experience it paled into insignificance with the burgers I used to have when I had to travel up to London to get a decent burger a good number of years ago. It couldn't rival Wolfe's, and certainly wasn't a patch on the hallowed memory of Chicago Meat Packers. You need to pull your socks up, GBK.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog