Betty's Burgers - Far from Best
From the first few moments spent in Betty’s Burgers you know this is going to be an interesting bite. There is a lot going on. The setup is very confusing. You wait for a table but then there is no table service. At all. There are plenty of free seats to help yourself to however.
There is a mild theme to this place too, trepid trailer park-cum-Hawaiian nostalgia.
The confusion doesn’t stop there. The awkward ordering space offers little time to order. You end up rushing what you want and by the time you’ve got a burger and chips it’s cost you twenty dollars from a ten-dollar starting point. Everything is an add-on.
Very few people are ordering a burger without fries. Very few. So why do so many places charge for, and upsell fries? It’s like selling a car with the optional extra of airbags.
The additional five dollars for bacon and pickles was a wise investment. The bacon crispy and the pickles crunched, juicy and not too tangy. The positive attributes of this meal pretty much stopped there.
After waiting for the buzzer to ring, you walk to the opposite end of the restaurant to collect your food. The first thing you see is the skin-on fries that are as dry as kindling. Bereft of moisture and life, these are the worst chips I have ever eaten. Two terminal stages short of being as dry and chewy as jerky, these fries are incomprehensible. How can you get chips wrong?
This is probably why they charge for sauce on the menu. The fries need to be soaked back alive in some two-dollar-a-pop glop.
The bun on the burger was ok. Soft and not sweet. The white onions, cheese and sauce weren’t overpowering. The patty was neutral, unobtrusive - merely there because it had to be. The culinary equivalent of “I’m just here so I wont’ get fined”.
Burger joint burgers typically aren’t great. It’s an inconvenient truth. You can trace the correlation between the poorness of the burger and the number of outposts a burger joint opens. A burger is a simple construct. But it takes time and attention. Or a lot of flavour and preservatives. McDonalds and Hungry Jacks offer better burgers than most burger joints, and everything is included in the menu price.
This is the problem with the concept of ‘best’. Too much expectation is placed on the shoulders of one thing. A lot is riding on it and you can just as easily fuck it up, as you can triumph.
One can’t help feel that the only reason this joint featured on any ‘best of’ lists, and number one (!?) on Tripadvisor AND Zomato, is a big marketing budget.
3/10 Pickles.
There is a mild theme to this place too, trepid trailer park-cum-Hawaiian nostalgia.
The confusion doesn’t stop there. The awkward ordering space offers little time to order. You end up rushing what you want and by the time you’ve got a burger and chips it’s cost you twenty dollars from a ten-dollar starting point. Everything is an add-on.
Very few people are ordering a burger without fries. Very few. So why do so many places charge for, and upsell fries? It’s like selling a car with the optional extra of airbags.
The additional five dollars for bacon and pickles was a wise investment. The bacon crispy and the pickles crunched, juicy and not too tangy. The positive attributes of this meal pretty much stopped there.
After waiting for the buzzer to ring, you walk to the opposite end of the restaurant to collect your food. The first thing you see is the skin-on fries that are as dry as kindling. Bereft of moisture and life, these are the worst chips I have ever eaten. Two terminal stages short of being as dry and chewy as jerky, these fries are incomprehensible. How can you get chips wrong?
This is probably why they charge for sauce on the menu. The fries need to be soaked back alive in some two-dollar-a-pop glop.
The bun on the burger was ok. Soft and not sweet. The white onions, cheese and sauce weren’t overpowering. The patty was neutral, unobtrusive - merely there because it had to be. The culinary equivalent of “I’m just here so I wont’ get fined”.
Burger joint burgers typically aren’t great. It’s an inconvenient truth. You can trace the correlation between the poorness of the burger and the number of outposts a burger joint opens. A burger is a simple construct. But it takes time and attention. Or a lot of flavour and preservatives. McDonalds and Hungry Jacks offer better burgers than most burger joints, and everything is included in the menu price.
This is the problem with the concept of ‘best’. Too much expectation is placed on the shoulders of one thing. A lot is riding on it and you can just as easily fuck it up, as you can triumph.
One can’t help feel that the only reason this joint featured on any ‘best of’ lists, and number one (!?) on Tripadvisor AND Zomato, is a big marketing budget.
3/10 Pickles.