Five Guys Covent Garden: fast food failure

Not fast. Not cheap. Not that tasty.

BREAKING NEWS: blogger eats burger at trendy new joint.

Forgive the sarcasm, but sometimes my own hobby bores me. But I had to go didn't I? A London food blog without a Five Guys review would be like a burger with no pattie.

God knows why though. Because Five Guys fails at EVERYTHING it attempts to be. Like many of my compatriots, my overwhelming feeling after leaving Five Guys was that I had just been on the receiving end of a lot of broken promises. Not all of those promises were made by Five Guys - many by its fans who had visited it in the US - and some were more hurtful than others. But a promise is a promise.

For a start, there are a lot more than five guys working for them. There were hundreds of minions, all dressed like they were on their way to a baseball game. Five bouncers at the door, five at the registers, five at the chip fryer, five building the burgers and five actually frying them. Then there were five cleaning up and five doing precious little but watching the queue. I make that Thirty-Five Guys.

It feels a lot like a McDonald's - but red is the colour. There's the crappy plastic diner feel, the queues at the registers and terrible, terrible uniforms. In fact, it would sit quite comfortably next to an Aberdeen Angus Steak House.

Like most tourist traps it tries to hide behind smiley staff, promises of provenance and fun text on the walls (the best one being "hand shaped burgers" - I really wish they were hand shaped rather than round). I'd say they have misunderstood the kind of people London burger lovers are, but that's not actually their market. Theirs is tourists, Americophiles and, apparently, people who wear K-Swiss and T-shirts with Rihanna on. The bloggers and burger lovers have hated the place.

The experience is pretty stressful. You queue once to order, and then sort of hover around waiting for the food in the middle of the atrium. As always happens when Brits are forced to loiter, a queue forms. So every now and then an employee has to come and break up the queue as it threatens to go out the door. It's a bonkers system.

The burger

The burger itself wasn't a disappointment - but more because my expectations were pretty low. To be fair, it probably slightly exceeded them. In the flesh they are not half as ugly as most blog pictures imply. It didn't look like it had been run over or delivered to you in an air drop. The meat was nicely cooked - the committee of cooks crowded around the grills evidently voted to take it off the heat at the right time. And the bread and toppings were good and fresh.

But to say all that is skirting around the issue. It didn't really taste of anything. The meat was almost fat-less and therefore flavourless. And it wasn't so much underseasoned as not seasoned at all. The two patties were generous enough, but both were thinner than the huge wedges of gherkin, which were so big that the predominant texture of the burger was crunchy. Burgers shouldn't be crunchy. They should be sloppy, juicy and almost impossible to eat.

With the burger you can get spicy or salty chips. By which they mean spicy chips or just chips. I went for just chips. I'd watched the bagger fill my pot with chips, then pour another scoop of chips straight into the bag. That's a lovely touch, because the best bit of going to McDonald's is fishing out those bonus fries from the bag at the end. Sadly I couldn't eat them all. They desperately needed an extra few minutes in the fryer. Some were soft and limp, which is really unpleasant for skin-on fries.

But the worst bit is the price. At £10.75 for burger and chips it's not cheap. A friend of mine said we shouldn't compare it to our more gourmet burgers because it's fast food. But it invites the comparison by pricing itself wrong. Fast food should be quick, cheap and tasty. Five Guys fails on all counts. It's £1 more than MEATliquor, £2.75 more than Dirty Burger and a whopping £3.25 more than Honest Burger. All of which do considerably better food in better places. The latter of those two do it faster too.

People will pay the price for a bit of Americana. Hell, I paid the price for a bit of Americana. But all I kept thinking while eating it was this could really do with a bit of Big Mac burger sauce. And that's not a good sign is it?


   

Mishkins: new deli?

Good food, better place

The tagline for Mishkins is "A kind of Jewish deli". To me, this was confusing. As I looked at the pictures I wondered: where are the glass counters? Where are the glass jars with red gingham lids? WHERE IS THE OVERPRICED CHEESE?!

After a bit of research I came to the conclusion that a deli can pretty much be what it wants to be, whether it's selling sandwiches, artisan cheese or bhan mi. Wikipedia even tried to claim delis could sell deep fried chicken. For it's part, Mishkin's wants to be a restaurant, but does everything in its power to prove it isn't one – like Nick Clegg claiming he's not a toff.

But you haven't fooled me E Mishkin. I've been to restaurants before, and they mostly look a lot like this. Not all as good as this, but a whole lot like it. Mishkins is beautiful on the inside, with stainless steel bar straight out of a Brent Lynch painting,shiny black and white lino floor and tiny tables lit by T-lights. It even has a wooden tardis-like confession box at the back with a private table, as if the rest of the restaurant wasn't cosy and unique enough.

I say private, but that's a slight exaggeration because, even in the closet at the back, the tables are so close together you sometimes find yourself listening to other people's conversations rather than your own. That's fine though; most strangers I meet are more interesting than me. The waiters were also an interesting bunch: truly lovely people who genuinely seemed to care if you were having a good night and, despite there being a queue for tables, allowed us an extra beer after we had finished eating.

And so to the food. Being about as decisive as the wind, I read the menu at lunchtime so I was prepared for dinner. The prices were astonishing. For such a talked about, trendy place in central London, £11 for a main is a revelation. Probably even cheaper than the very average Cote nearby. Never has the sight of a number made me hungry before. I'd been hankering for my half Reuben with coleslaw and "East End" chips for about six hours by the time I got to eat it. Thankfully (and rightly, because it's a sandwich) it had only taken 10 minutes to arrive. Reubens are a brilliant mix of salt beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and seemingly whatever dressing takes the chef's fancy, but traditionally thousand island. This one must have been good, because to my horror I'd polished it off before I even thought to take a picture (hence this picture, which won't exactly have David Loftus quivering in his boots). Despite the fact that the beef was a little too chewy (a real sin in salt beef) and the sauerkraut no more sauer than the coleslaw, it was a damned fine sandwich. However, it dawned on me as I chewed that I had just paid £8 for half a sandwich. To be fair it was toasted, but it wasn't like it was slow-toasted overnight. Almost a tenner for a slice of bread? This is no deli.

My friend's mac&cheese with salt beef felt a little more like a restaurant dish, but sadly the sauce was rather thin and the pasta overcooked, which meant it bore too much resemblance in texture to the milkshake he'd had at the bar while waiting for me (why am I always late?!). Still, we polished it all of, plus chips, in about 10 minutes.

It occurs to me that you're not really paying for the food at Mishkins, but the concept; the exciting thought that you went out for dinner and ended up, not in a restaurant, but a deli. So people who know little about food can go "Darrrling, forget Pizza Express, I know this charming little place opposite the theatre where they're showing Shrek". How unusual, how experiential! I can't tell whether I'm being sarcastic, because I really enjoyed my meal at Mishkins, and the Maple Old Fashioned I drank was really, really excellent.

In the end, I think it was partly the fact that it was so obviously a London restaurant that endeared it to me. Built off buzz on the blogosphere, founded in an unusual place, funded by one entrepreneur and, even with the words "Jewish deli" in the tagline, still serving burgers and pulled pork sandwiches.

It's no deli, or even new deli, but I love it all the same. I'll be back darrrling.