Eating at Burger Fair and deeply regretting it

 8 Auguust 2021

 

BURGER FAIR

corner of Strand Road and Park Street, Bellville

 

In the early evening of a very lazy Sunday, the wife, motivated and inspired by recent posts on this group, and a certain nostalgia for the treats of her much younger days, suggested we take the dogs and go on an adventure to the Northern suburbs, specifically Burger Fair, for an early supper.

 

Suffice to say, at the end of the meal we concluded that it had been two hours of our lives and R340,00 of our income we’ll never get back, and made a pinky promise to each other never, ever to return.

 

Both of us have been to Burger Fair at least once but, in the wife’s case, her previous visit was in the mid-Nineties and mine, if Burger Fair is indeed that old, in the early Seventies. So it’s been an institution and, considering our experience, a minor miracle that it’s still in business. On the other hand, the prices are budget friendly, so maybe that’s the reason why people still go there.

 

The brightly lit building seemed kind of romantic in the dark though one still parks in a less than alluring parking lot and, if  there weren’t many cars when we arrived, there was a steady turnover during the time we were there. It felt eerie, sitting in our car in the dark, looking out at random vehicles coming and going, looking at a building that could be dinosaur resurrected by genetic manipulation; it was real but it seemed so anachronistically out of time.

 

The menu, a laminated A4 sheet with an almost bewildering number of options, arrived quickly and, once we’d ordered, the food was served relatively quickly too. One has many options, perhaps too many to guarantee quality across the board, and there is also a cornucopia of drinks. So far, so good.

 

The wife ordered the double cheese burger and fries (R62) and I chose the 300g ribs and fries (R97) and both of us ordered the side of onion rings (R50), and she went for the chocolate milkshake and my choice was the lime milkshake, my default  milkshake option.

 

Yes, the food is served on a tray that clips on over the partially open side window but it’s only one tray, where my recollection was that each person would’ve had their own tray, but my memory probably can’t be trusted on this one.

 

Kudos for serving the food on proper ceramic plates (mine were a stylish black or dark grey), the effect being destroyed by the sad contrast of cheap plastic cutlery.  Unfortunately, one was then faced with precariously balancing the plate on one’s knees, a predicament made worse because the main meal and the onion rings were served on separate, large plates. Surely, the food should be served on another tray for the lap?  Eating like this in a car is very awkward, challenging and risky, in that one ill-advised movement may cause a nasty spill on either, or both, clothes or interior of vehicle.

 

My meal comprised of a small salad, partly crushed by the weight of the substantial amount of fries, and a sizable chunk of rib, valiantly trying to keep its proverbial head above water in a vast primordial ocean of utterly bland sauce from a bottle. The sauce insidiously crept under the fries and about half of them soon became soggy, with not only the crispness ruined but now redolent of the less than salubrious sauce. The ribs were well cooked, though flavourless without sauce, and ruined with sauce,  and the fries, pre-sogginess, were nicely crisp.

 

The wife didn’t like her burger at all. The cheese was processed, the two patties fell apart quickly and the bun was no good. To add insult to injury, the burger was also blessed with an abundance of the same flavourless sauce that came with my ribs. Her fries were good.

 

Ordering the onion rings was a terrible mistake, both regarding quantity and quality. There was a plateful of the things and the visual impression of golden, crisp rings was positive but as soon as one chewed a ring, you knew no onion was harmed in the making of this item.  Obviously from a large catering bag, the ring was 99,99% dough, with only the vaguest rumour of onion, and if it were dusted in cinnamon sugar would have made a nice thin doughnut. A decent onion ring it was not.

 

The wife ate one onion ring and gave up on the ghastliness. I was morbidly fascinated by the doughy texture and ate all of mine because I was taught to eat what’s on my plate, all the time wondering whether these rings of artery clogging dodginess would take their revenge on me in the deep of the night. I could see many anti-acid tablets in my future.

 

It was the kind of meal where mediocrity would have been a positive. I did earnestly seek to find the upsides, which were only the well-cooked ribs and the good fries, amid the essentially unhappy food experience and it’s distressing that grasps at straws to mitigate the disappointment. There would’ve been no point in sending the food back or complaining to the manager, who might well have been baffled at our lack of appreciation for what probably is there A game.

 

The issue is not that Burger Fair didn’t do what they always do; the issue is that our expectations are not in sync with the establishment’s level of cuisine.

 

I may once have thought that this kind of food represented the apex of my culinary expectations but, as the wife said, cheap food is seldom good food and this variety of cheap is not cheering.

 

The milkshakes were excellent though, proper milkshakes with  the right flavour and texture. Perhaps one should go to Burger Fair just for these.

 

Afterwards, we drove to the nearby McDonalds drive thru for a couple of ice creams with Flakes, just to cleanse the palate.