Food Review: Gourmet Burger Cairo
“Gourmet” and “Burger” are two words that automatically incite excitement, curiosity and anticipation of a mouth-watering experience. At first Gourmet Burger, a dainty little place on the corner of Zamalek’s infamous Brazil Street, meets expectations in terms of creativity and its stand-out brand of burger making that separates it from the rest.
GBC’s menu is like an international journey where burgers represent the best of different cultures, flavors and tastes from around the world. Each unique creation comes with its own twist, whether it is your standard New York cheeseburger or an Italian, Belgian, Sicilian or French interpretation of the universally loved food. One really has to applaud the concept, where the menu is small but packed with variety – even the vegetarian crowd is not forgotten with a vegetarian sandwich with several options for sides and appetizers.
A few tables inside act as a non-smoking section while, unlike other places in the area, outdoor tables provide smokers and open-air enthusiasts with a pleasant place to dine. The service is decent, the place is small but, like the menu, packed with options, and while it is not quite quaint, it is clean and peaceful.
Choosing a burger is the real challenge, whether you stay safe and go for the GBC house special, a colorful double beef patty with grilled onions and tomatoes on a bed of fresh red lettuce drenched in GBC’s very special, very secret, sauce, or venture off the beaten track with a more inventive option.
The Burger Breakdown:
When your burger arrives, it is served on a huge bun with the standard French fries on the side. You also have the option of adding any of GBC’s numerous sides and dips.
The visually pleasing double Decker is huge and very filling, packed with fresh ingredients. However, the bread was very dry, tasteless and hard to bite through, rendering it difficult to enjoy the burger as a whole. Grilled to perfection—cooked but still alive with crunchiness—the onions complimented the special sauce, even if there were a few too many which made it very hard to enjoy the beef flavor.
The burger patty was well done (the only option) with appropriate char grilled flavor, but it was lacking that explosive juiciness one expects from a beef patty. It was also too thin and somewhat rubbery in texture. If you try the burger’s components alone, each is fresh and tasty but somehow all together it was hard to chew and some of the flavors cancelled each other out.
While GBC is in its own category of burger places with options like an Indian-themed lamb burger infused with curry sauce and spicy jalapenos, let’s hope it is able to balance the flavors, keep the ingredients fresh and the combinations interesting so we want to come back for the food, not just the concept.
Rating:
