Julie's Boggle

A little while back, we took advantage of the lovely long summer evenings to go a bit out of our way to find our evening meal. In this case our destination was the Gourmet Burger Kitchen in Bayswater – about 15 minutes walk from Notting Hill Tube.

The GBK chain has been spreading like wildfire over London this past year. I had read a few reviews so I was mostly prepared for how things work there. Basically it’s a curious cross between a pub and a restaurant. A waiter shows you to a table, and gives you a menu but then you have to go and order at the counter, remembering to give them your table number (which cunningly is not marked anywhere on said table). You pay at the counter and then go and sit down, drinks and food are later brought to your table.

The scope of the menu is quite wide given that it’s all variations on burgers. It was quite hard to choose just one from the list! In the end I had the Kiwi-Burger, with pineapple, beetroot, cheese and egg (!), and Tom had a blue-cheese-sauce burger. We ordered one of their milkshakes, which come in big silver milkshake containers like the ones they use to have at the Tropicale in Durban.

Sadly, the milkshake was an area that rather let them down. Although I’d seen them putting real icecream in, they obviously don’t use very much of it, and they make up for it with some sort of thickening agent. So the milkshake looks thick and frothy, but acts runny and the foam is suspiciously springy. And it has that artificial “thick-mouth” feel when you drink it. To crown it all off, the chocolate flavour wasn’t very realistic – so big thumbs down on the milkshake.

The burgers were pretty good though. They arrive with a wooden skewer through them to hold the whole assembly together, and while the presentation isn’t awesome, the food is very tasty, meets most of the requirements of a first-class burger, and hits the spot. And for £16, it was a cheap and cheerful night out.