Overcooked, overbunned, underwhelming
Burger source
Gaucho has a history of serving some of the best Argentine steak in London. Craft, quality ingredients and an upscale experience have long been its stock in trade. Three decades on, is it still going strong? Let’s see whether its delivered burger lives up to my memory of the steak.
The order
Gaucho burger: featuring what is presumably an Argentine beef patty, smoked ketchup, melted cheese, chimichurri, and a portion of skin-on chips.
The meat of it
On first look, I’m hopeful. The perfect melt on the pale cheese (cheddar, I think), the thin-sliced home made pickles, the strong char, the shiny bun, the crisp, well-seasoned looking fries. Let’s look in cross-section.
In cross-section, appearances initially seem promising: a robust bun, a coarse grind to the beef, good layering of veg, pickled onions and lettuce, smoked ketchup, and some mayo or aioli that hasn’t escaped from the burger. The pale cheese is evenly distributed. But something’s not right. The meat isn’t grey, but it isn’t pink either. There’s little grease. It feels dense as I cut through it. How does it hold up to taste?
First bite… there’s a heavy crust to the beef, but it’s too lightly seasoned. There’s a dense chew to the bun, and there’s too much of it. The pickles are bland; none of the bright, sweet crispness I associate with homemade, thin-sliced pickley goodness. The coarse-ground meat has a hint of dry-aged funk about it but is literally dry, needing the aioli to balance it out. The ketchup is on the cloyingly sweet side, while the cheese is so subtle as to be practically invisible, lacking the molten goo of cheaper American cheese. The overall mouthfeel is brittle and arid. Beef breaks off in chunks and crumbles rather than melting away; the cheese adds little, while the veg falls away in clumps, adding crunch but no flavour, brightness or contrast. The char is more reminiscent of an overcooked barbecue burger than a quality sear from an expensive griddle plate. If there was chimichurri in this, it was beyond my palate to detect it.
It’s disappointing. Quality ingredients have been wasted through poor cooking technique, middling seasoning and weak flavour combinations. The team behind this should spend time at Five Guys or another specialist burger outfit to understand that great burgers rely on the components working together, melding into something greater than the sum of their parts. This isn’t that. It’s less.
The fries are a mixed bag. Literally. A generous portion of attractive-looking fries turns out to be an inconsistent mix of undercooked and underseasoned chips. When they’re good, they’re actually quite decent: crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside, seasoned just enough, and pairing well with a dunk in ketchup and mayo. But too many are chewy, suggesting they weren’t par-cooked or fried for long enough. Empty calories and, unusually for me, left unfinished.
Monkey finger rating
Bun – 3/5 – too chewy
Build – 4/5
Burger – 2/5
Taste – 2/5
Sides – 3/5 -bump for the onion fries
Value – 3/5 – £18 incl. delivery, service charge etc., and a 20% Deliveroo discount.
Burger rating – 2/5 – would not go again.
The deets
There are Gauchos all over. Go there for the steak and maybe don’t bother with delivery. This was disappointing.
Burger Source 