Is it a kind of magic?
Pro You get a lot of chips to enjoy.
Con You get a lot of time to look at the empty plate afterwards.
Pay
€€
Per Person €22 Two large beers, a shared starter and a main. Adding a dessert would have pushed it to €€€
In Short
Hopes. A bit of bankable bespoke burger business.
Reality. Burger this for a game of soldiers.
First Impressions. Well, inside it looks like Miami might. During a category 5 hurricane. Deserted.
USP? Evening magical cabaret.
The offer in three words. Underwhelming. Underwhelming. Underwhelming.
Service! Did the magician make the staff disappear?
Friend friendly? "We haven't forgotten the vegetarians," offers the menu. The inference meat eaters dodge green things doesn't sit well.
Rating for dating. Don't expect enchantment.
Tip? Not on your nelly.
Change one thing? Add some pride.
Revisitability. More a case of Repello muggleton.
Compare & Contrast
El Canadiense or Steakburger.
In Pictures
On Google Images
What's the story?
Positives were hard to come by on a Saturday lunch near Glorieta Bilbao.
Things started OK. A little plate of fishy shaped biscuits and some acidy pepper cream was a nice touch. At this point we spotted a first. A burger bar advertising a guest magician? Indeed, so. Apparently, said mage was booked for a two-hour close-up trickery session that evening. We're not sure he might have been practising, as the afternoon seemed full of strange spells...
Specialis Revelio
The menu's not massive, but there are a few idiosyncratic oddities on it, so we went for one of those, chose a random burger and for variety, added a single portion of ribs.
Confundo
We may have solved a mystery even a certain girl-genius sorceror might struggle with. No, not who put the dead pigeons in the water tank. Or even who killed the chauffeur? I have to confess I have long wondered, in the kind of idle moments that lead you to write restaurant reviews, watch every Carry On film in production order or do a degree in Astrophysics, why Spain, with its Iberian wisdom, has never caught on to baked beans. So - time for an experiment.
Best we start with the null hypothesis. Stick 'em on buttered toast. Make a pot of tea. Job done. The dream snack of many a ten year old (aged from seven to seventy), they work. Now, a theory. Do BBz clash with Spanish savoury ingredients on a basic level? And is that because they are, essentially, sweet? Well, hello Hot Plate. The oncoming storm in food form.
Mix some beans with cheese, then blast in an oven. Finally, plonk a grilled chorizo in the middle. Result? A strange, unholy, sensory experience. Feel your synapses connect in unexpected ways. Eating this is like Roger Federer playing tiddlywinks, Mark Knopfler doing a kazoo solo or Diego Guerrero knocking up a marmite sandwich.
The cheese wasn't salty, so the good ship chorizo was becalmed in a sweet, slightly tomatoey, creamy, bean-flecked sea, with the sausage's spice emphasising the sweetness all the more. Less a contrast, more an open conflict, this isn't a restaurant dish. Your ten year old self might knock it up on a cooking day with granny. Both of you would enjoy making it, trying it and then never bothering again. It'd take more than being Obliviated to forget this one. Oh, and no bread to help gather the gloop, either.
Arresto Momentum
It took a good ten minutes for the starter to turn up, presumably for baking. But the mains took as long, too - with no other customers in the place and an easy estimate on how long we'd need for that smallish starter.
A solo portion of ribs was fine for one, and points for two extra pots of sauce. Barbecue was a generous splodge, tomato and coriandery salsa a decent palette cleanser. The ribs - smallish ones - were good, with plenty of flakeyness. Aside from serviettes, there was no clean-up equipment, though. A water bowl and slice of lemon would be ideal, but a monogrammed handwipe only arrived with the bill.
Our sample - Bourbon - burger didn't look over-excited by its lot. Lonely, on its square plate, with an undeniably heaped basket of potato wedges, there was no salad garnish. This is a laudable choice. We don't need food wasted on decoration. Optional offers - we'd turn them down - are smarter. There were no extra sauces, this time. A familiar tasting cheese slice topped it, along with. enigmatically, four nearly raw strips of capsicum. Red, red, green, green. Some kind of code, perhaps?
Cooking - welldone/hecho for us - was well judged, with a hint of pinkness remaining. But the meat was very dense and so filling my next meal turned out to be breakfast. As it often can, whisky sauce came across as quite artificial on the palette.
As a combination this just didn't work for me and I'd have ordered the Mexican, had I been choosing. All in all, the quality doesn't warrant the carbon and water footprints you've got to live with.
Immobilus
Pro You get a lot of chips to enjoy.
Con You get a lot of time to look at the empty plate afterwards.
Pay
€€
Per Person €22 Two large beers, a shared starter and a main. Adding a dessert would have pushed it to €€€
In Short
Hopes. A bit of bankable bespoke burger business.
Reality. Burger this for a game of soldiers.
First Impressions. Well, inside it looks like Miami might. During a category 5 hurricane. Deserted.
USP? Evening magical cabaret.
The offer in three words. Underwhelming. Underwhelming. Underwhelming.
Service! Did the magician make the staff disappear?
Friend friendly? "We haven't forgotten the vegetarians," offers the menu. The inference meat eaters dodge green things doesn't sit well.
Rating for dating. Don't expect enchantment.
Tip? Not on your nelly.
Change one thing? Add some pride.
Revisitability. More a case of Repello muggleton.
Compare & Contrast
El Canadiense or Steakburger.
In Pictures
On Google Images
What's the story?
Positives were hard to come by on a Saturday lunch near Glorieta Bilbao.
Things started OK. A little plate of fishy shaped biscuits and some acidy pepper cream was a nice touch. At this point we spotted a first. A burger bar advertising a guest magician? Indeed, so. Apparently, said mage was booked for a two-hour close-up trickery session that evening. We're not sure he might have been practising, as the afternoon seemed full of strange spells...
Specialis Revelio
The menu's not massive, but there are a few idiosyncratic oddities on it, so we went for one of those, chose a random burger and for variety, added a single portion of ribs.
Confundo
We may have solved a mystery even a certain girl-genius sorceror might struggle with. No, not who put the dead pigeons in the water tank. Or even who killed the chauffeur? I have to confess I have long wondered, in the kind of idle moments that lead you to write restaurant reviews, watch every Carry On film in production order or do a degree in Astrophysics, why Spain, with its Iberian wisdom, has never caught on to baked beans. So - time for an experiment.
Best we start with the null hypothesis. Stick 'em on buttered toast. Make a pot of tea. Job done. The dream snack of many a ten year old (aged from seven to seventy), they work. Now, a theory. Do BBz clash with Spanish savoury ingredients on a basic level? And is that because they are, essentially, sweet? Well, hello Hot Plate. The oncoming storm in food form.
The cheese wasn't salty, so the good ship chorizo was becalmed in a sweet, slightly tomatoey, creamy, bean-flecked sea, with the sausage's spice emphasising the sweetness all the more. Less a contrast, more an open conflict, this isn't a restaurant dish. Your ten year old self might knock it up on a cooking day with granny. Both of you would enjoy making it, trying it and then never bothering again. It'd take more than being Obliviated to forget this one. Oh, and no bread to help gather the gloop, either.
Arresto Momentum
It took a good ten minutes for the starter to turn up, presumably for baking. But the mains took as long, too - with no other customers in the place and an easy estimate on how long we'd need for that smallish starter.
A solo portion of ribs was fine for one, and points for two extra pots of sauce. Barbecue was a generous splodge, tomato and coriandery salsa a decent palette cleanser. The ribs - smallish ones - were good, with plenty of flakeyness. Aside from serviettes, there was no clean-up equipment, though. A water bowl and slice of lemon would be ideal, but a monogrammed handwipe only arrived with the bill.
Cooking - welldone/hecho for us - was well judged, with a hint of pinkness remaining. But the meat was very dense and so filling my next meal turned out to be breakfast. As it often can, whisky sauce came across as quite artificial on the palette.
As a combination this just didn't work for me and I'd have ordered the Mexican, had I been choosing. All in all, the quality doesn't warrant the carbon and water footprints you've got to live with.
Immobilus
The workmanlike food offer isn't going to win awards, but it's the service that finished our interest in Miami Meat. Things started off slowly, but then, like the Hogwarts Express encountering leaves on the line, it came to a dead halt.
Hopper couldn't have painted it better. Three uninterested servers busy chatting, looking at their phones or staring into space, in a near-deserted restaurant, as customers longed to pay and get out. It doesn't take a master of the Dark Arts to deduce those anomalies might be connected. Hiring a talent show conjurer to attract custom is a symptom, not a USP. The package isn't even close to magical.
Diminuendo
Apparate
With the service staff apparently hypotised into stasis, we couldn't be bothered to dedicate half an hour (and more neurons than it should warrant) to the sheer thaumaturgy needed to conjure up a piece of apple pie. Eventually, someone twigged we weren't actually playing charades, but trying to attract their attention. So 20 minutes after the mains ended, we got the bill, paid it and, with no need for a wizard, disappeared.
Hopper couldn't have painted it better. Three uninterested servers busy chatting, looking at their phones or staring into space, in a near-deserted restaurant, as customers longed to pay and get out. It doesn't take a master of the Dark Arts to deduce those anomalies might be connected. Hiring a talent show conjurer to attract custom is a symptom, not a USP. The package isn't even close to magical.
Diminuendo
Overall, the value's not the best, either. The hotplate was about €2 more than its portion size warranted. The detail-lite burger and no effort at table sauces beyond Heinz sachets doesn't feel generous. Is there a silver lining? €2.50 for a large Mahou is good value.
Apparate
With the service staff apparently hypotised into stasis, we couldn't be bothered to dedicate half an hour (and more neurons than it should warrant) to the sheer thaumaturgy needed to conjure up a piece of apple pie. Eventually, someone twigged we weren't actually playing charades, but trying to attract their attention. So 20 minutes after the mains ended, we got the bill, paid it and, with no need for a wizard, disappeared.