I’ve got an idea, let’s open A.N Other burger place…
Burger Drop (448 Westgate Rd, NE4 9BL) is a burger joint on the West Road that opened during or just before lockdown (unlucky).
So not the best start, but through 2020, they were as busy as the the PIF entry on companies house. And much like that, they’re now fully open so it all worked out OK in the end. ‘Sit in’ is only from 5pm, so there’s a weird takeaway vibe which is uniquely and mildly off-putting.
The challenge here is that the burger market in Newcastle got extremely crowded c.2016 and many came and went. It is incredibly difficult to carve out a niche, and you’ve really gotta force a reason for punters to come back. You’re the best price? Have the wackiest flavours? Offer the best classic burger? Or the best fries? IMO, if you haven’t got something, you’ve got nothing.
Burger Drop are touting ‘craft burgers’, whatever that is. Smashed burgers is what they are. AKA, Burger Trend, 2020— of course. Unfortunately, smash burgers are pretty well covered by Meat:Stack, still the best dirty burger in town for me. But Burger Drop is, to be fair, competitive on price with the double-burger-no-cheese starting from £5.50 which is as cheap as you’ll get. Beef is promised to never be frozen, but if you’re looking for bacon, it’s one of those places that only offers a turkey alternative. Yeah, but no thanks.
Just a glance at a good burgers should always illicit a primeval response and to be fair, they look great. That glazed sesame-spotted bread is a textbook burger bun that Ronald McDonald himself would dream of. The smash gives it some of those frilly, gnarly skirted bits which droop just beyond the bread. You can imagine it doing well on Insta, Uber Eats, et al.
But looks can be deceiving, and … they’re just OK. More McDonalds than Meat:Stack. But even Five Guys this is not. It’s all just a bit bland, which is about the worst thing a burger can be. A forgettable slab of meat, a bit of a waste of a cow, calories you’ll almost resentfully need to burn. The few toppings don’t help that much (cheese, mushrooms, onions, chilli, etc. are classic but yawn inducing). Burgers might be ‘just’ meat in bread, but that is deceptively difficult to be brilliant at.
I’ve been a few times and really tried to love it each time but I just can’t. The menu is brief but in a way the lack of any type of special, or some kid of raison d’être means once you’ve been there, you’ve completed it. And I’ve never felt compelled to come back, other than to ‘give it another go’. I have tried a number of times.
In what should be one of life’s great joys, the fries are also disappointing — dry and limp like an unwanted paper straw. You get a lot of them and really, for £1.50 who’s to argue, but they’re an empty carb. When your competition is frying in beef fat, you’ve gotta be better. Even worse were these loaded fries which were soggy AF and really just quite unpleasant. If you’re ever gonna ‘load’ fries, the chips need to stand up to whatever’s on them, and the combination of plastic cheese sauce and sour cream here just left behind a mush.
I’ve tried to love it, but I’m just not into it, soz. Meat:Stack, Fat Hippo, Patties all do it better 🤷🏻♂️
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