I recently visited an American-style burger restaurant in central London that goes by the name of Meat Liquor. It's a place that has been heavily talked up of late by people who really should know better.
From the moment we arrived the whole experience was horrendous. The restaurant has a strict no bookings policy so you have to queue for an extremely long period (we were queueing for over an hour) and I can only imagine this pretentious rule is in force to try and build hype and make the restaurant look like the hottest place in town due to the 200 people snaking around the outside of the building waiting for their supper. I just found the policy wanky and annoying and I was praying that once inside the food would blow my socks off with it's quality but yet again I was let down.
After we eventually entered we were hit by unnecessarily loud music from every corner and hideous décor that looked like it had been lazily splashed about by a simpleton. We were instructed to take a seat at the bar while they got our table ready and after looking at the over priced offerings (£4 for a small bottle of beer, £8 for a cocktail) we decided to go for the cheapest bottle of house wine and this was probably the only thing that we enjoyed all night. Well that was until they handed us two jam jars to drink out of. I'm not sure who's pea-brained idea that was but they should have been fired on the spot and swung out of the nearest window by their ears. It probably cost more to source 200 jam jars than to just bulk buy a load of cheap wine glasses and they just don't work as something that you'd want to drink liquid out of. The jagged rims where the screw top lid would have been, just made the gulps of wine needlessly annoying and uncomfortable. I felt like asking the waiter if he'd be kind enough to fill my jar up with half a pint of his finest piss and to hurl the offerings straight at the owners of this shitty establishment.
We eventually got taken to our table and my god was it loud. Crappy cock-rock bellowed out at us from every angle and we were shouting at each other throughout to try and make ourselves heard over the din. We decided to order as quickly as possible so we could get the fuck out of there and I quickly chose the double cheeseburger as my housemate went for the Philly cheese steak sandwich. The meals don't come with any sides so we ordered a bowl of chips to share and seemed fairly pleased with our choices until I asked for my burger to be cooked rare. 'Sorry we only cook our burgers medium as a rule' was the answer I was given by the wonky-eyed waitress.
What sort of burger restaurant doesn't allow you to have your meat cooked to your own preference? At the end of the day It would actually be quicker for them to make the burger rare and would allow them to free up table space faster so they could get more suckers through the door. It made me think that their chefs were burger flippers of the lowest quality and that the meat they were using for the burgers was also of a piss poor standard as you had to cook it all the way through to ensure you didn't give your customers worms if they asked for the meat to be even slightly under done.
After having to wait a further twenty minutes for our food to arrive I was really starting to get annoyed by the place, especially the dreadful artwork on the walls and ceiling. Giant pig and bear heads painted in a punk rock style with zany hair and piercings and splashes of red paint that I assumed was meant to resemble blood dripping down their faces. It looked naff and really wasn't something that I wanted to look at whilst having a meal but they were unavoidable due to them taking up the entire room.
Our food eventually arrived and bemusingly came minus plates and was just served on a single tray which we had to share and eat off. The thin layer of paper that came on top of the tray quickly became greasy due to the saturated double burger dripping fat everywhere which meant that my burger's bun was soggy and falling apart in my hands.
The burger was small in size, devoid of flavour and a greasy mess that made me feel utterly grim once I'd finished. The chips were okay but nothing special and probably cooked from frozen but my hungry housemate did seem to enjoy his Philly cheese steak sandwich, which he blandly described as 'Quite nice'. Bearing in mind though that this is a guy who's favourite food is Chicken Kiev with beans so perhaps 'Quite nice' wasn't really much of a compliment and the sandwich was also of a shoddy standard. Who knows? What I do know is I won't be going back to find out.
The final bill came to £36 and for the small amounts that we had (1 burger, 1 sandwich and a bowl of chips to share) coupled with the turgid quality of the produce, we both thought it was poor value for money and not an experience that either of us enjoyed. It really is a place that is very much style over substance and a totally shite style at that.
If you're thinking of visiting Meat Liquor you really shouldn't bother, you can get far superior burgers for cheaper at numerous other establishments dotted around London so do yourself a favour and sniff those out first. You won't have to queue like a cunt for two hours either.
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