By Herald and Sunday Herald critics Ron Mackenna and Joanna Blythman
Bread Meats Bread, Great Western Road, Glasgow, 0141 648 0399, Lunch/Dinner: £6-£15, Food rating: 7/10
This branch doesn't have the typical Meat Loaf, Bat out Of Hell darkness of your usual burger bar. The menu is a global family tree of variations on burgers so they slip smoky Italian Scamorza cheese into your bacon burger along with bone marrow butter. Red label burgers feature fiery, fatty chilli sausage. Kimchi, stamps its piquant footprint all over the menu, in the Kim Yong Burger, the KimCheese burger, the Bacon Kimchi "poutine" (the latter a grizzly Quebecois assembly of chips, cheese, and brown gravy). It offers better than average sourcing of ingredients: there’s a guarantee of Scottish grass-fed beef; they bother to have free-range chicken; you get the Errington Cheese Company’s artisan Lanark Blue cheese, not some cheap, industrial Euro-blue. Portions are massive, prices low. You could do worse.
Joanna Blythman
Byron Burger, West George Street, Glasgow, 0141 354 0007
Byron Burger is a favoured haunt of the bearded young 'uns. Decor is concrete ceilings with a post-industrial feel. It claims to serve “simple, delicious hamburgers, made with the best ingredients possible”. But then, everybody claims that.
I have courgette fries which arrive dusted in flour and salt. Unfortunately, and like the onion rings, they’re very oily.
Burgers choices include Bunzilla – soy glaze, miso-roasted bacon, wasabi mayonnaise – or B-Rex (American cheese, jalapenos) it’s to be a Byron burger – house sauce, bacon, mature cheddar. Paul has the Classic – lettuce, tomato, red onion.
Despite the towering menu descriptions, Byron burgers are not in any way related to those monstrosities speared with a tooth pick that are usually designed to hide the taste of the, usually rubber, burger. These are simple things, small and inoffensive to the eye. The meat in mine is tasty, the bun smoothly glazed.
Are they outstanding? No, they are not. But they are popular - and there's no arguing with that. Proof, though, that the burger boom is certainly not over. 7/10
The Counter, Springfield Quay, Glasgow
0141 418 0873
All the way from California the famous build your own burger with a million combos. Bit tired now. Booths, some neon shtick, with a slightly upmarket Americana feel to it but otherwise unremarkable. Can’t fault the waiting staff who are pleasant and friendly and even warned me not to try the tater thing – I should have listened. The burger moves upmarket or that’s the plan. Hugely overpriced with awful starters and burgers with a side coming in at £13. Truly awful set of starter dishes that plumbed new depths and pretty forgettable burgers, too. 5/10
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