Savoury pepper-bomb, not for the faint of heart

Burger source 

I didn’t intend to have three burgers in a row, but I got slightly egged into it by the cousins I was holidaying with and it did, indeed, look awesome when I saw it on someone else’s plate so… 

The order 

Well, I did decide to embrace some variety so – alongside the burger, which was:

I mean who can argue with any of that, really? The eponymous beef burger featured double 3.5oz patties, crispy turkey ham, American cheese, cheese sauce and skin-on fries.

I split the burger with my cousin-in-law… and we also had…

That’s right, no less than the house favourite, the snowy popcorn chicken pizza, replete with pizza sauce, mozzarella, garlic, cabbage, popcorn chicken and spicy sauce. Not going to review this in any detail, but I’ll give you a sense of it, I promise.

The meat of it 

The fries look astounding. The burger, unnecessarily staked with a serrated steak knife, has a coating of the cheese sauce, the melty slice of American cheese protecting the salad, in turn protecting the lower bun. The turkey ham, controversially, sits between the patties. The layering is comically random, but… Let’s see the cross section.

The burger is well done – not in a good way. Some significant resistance to cutting through it. The bun is soft but holds its structural integrity.

First bite… brilliant , good seasoning on the patty, a wall of umami from the cheese/burger sauce… initial thought is YES, this is good. This is rapidly followed by a WALL of black pepper, which I think probably made up 5% of the mass of the burger. Ludicrously peppery – so much so that the kids (who had ordered a ‘plain’ version of the burger, because, y’know, kids) couldn’t eat it. Pepper notwithstanding, the burger was too well done, the sweet of the salad wasn’t sufficient for the savoury kick in the head, the balance of the whole thing was off. The initial positive reaction to the umami, to the texture, fell apart a bit on persistent eating and I’m really glad I only had half a burger to get through. The turkey ham – wasn’t crisp. But added even more salt.

The strongest redeeming feature? The superb skin on fries. Crisp on the outside, squidgy in the middle, perfectly seasoned – just a joy. Wonderful dipped in the (slightly sweet) local mayo or the ketchup.

This was such a shame. The concept is STRONG – crispy, spicy popcorn chicken bites, with a hint of sweetness. Crunchy – but not chewy – cabbage worked surprisingly well as a compliment. But a hopelessly soggy base, a massively overgenerous helping of mozzarella, left to something of a mess. Half the pizza went uneaten (though we did polish off all the popcorn chicken).

Monkey finger rating  

Bun –  3/5  
Build – 2/5 
Burger – 25/5 
Taste –  2.5/5  
Sides – 4/5 – really excellent fries   
Value – 4/5 – RM38 is reasonable, in the area and in general for this amount of food.  

Burger rating – 2.5/5 – the pepper means I cannot recommend this. They need to rebalance the seasoning, modify the cook so it’s not so crunchy, and think about pickles or a sweeter burger sauce to event it all out. 

The deets 

Just up the beach from the Parkroyal on Pantai Tengah, the sunsets at this restaraunt really are the main event. Absolutely beautiful.