BRGR Co on Wardour Street, Soho - The Lebanese Invasion.

BRGR.CO is another joint that launched as part of a spate of burger-focused openings in London at the tail end of 2012. Situated at the top of Wardour Street, just off Oxford Street, it's a burger import from that well-known Lebanese burger capital, Beiruit....(!)

BRGR.CO Soho 6oz Burger

BRGR.CO it opened its doors in December 2012 to a host of early and somewhat mixed reviews. I've given it a few weeks to settle into it's stride, so it was time I hit it up with a regular burger chomping dining companion to give you my account of BRGR.CO, Soho.

Price: 

6oz 'Butcher's Cut' Burger - £7.95. Extra Cheese £0.95.
Crunchy fries - £3.25. 
Mac 'n' Cheese - £4.25

BRGR.CO Soho Menu

Presentation:

I quite liked it. Served in a similar style to MeatLiquor, on metal tray with patterned greaseproof paper, the burger and salad are separated out in a DIY-add-in-what-you-like style. The burger is almost completely unadorned (save the cheese, charged at £0.95). 

BRGR Co Soho 6oz Signature Gourmet Burger with Cajun dip

Toppings:

Bacon and Cheese. The cheese, vintage cheddar, was well melted, but lacked something of a punch, which was needed to cut through the buttery roll and mellow juices of the burger. I asked for bacon (for £1.50 extra), but they had unfortunately run out, so they comped us two bourbon oreo milkshakes. They were excellent, but weren't bacon. The rest of the salad remained on the side, as the chef intended. I did, however, try the pickles which were pretty good with excellent crunch.

Mmm...burger juice.

Meat:

The patty in the BRGR Co Signature Gourmet Cheeseburger has a good flavour, is lightly seasoned, and is pretty juicy...BUT the burger wasn't served medium-rare as requested on either of our burgers - precision cooking is needed with a patty this thin - and the texture of the beef was slightly 'sludgey' - suggesting pre-salting of the patties, which breaks down the protein structure of the beef. If you're serving a naked burger without salad or condiments, the beef needs to be spot on...as it happens, this slightly misses the mark.

BRGR Co burger cut-through

Bun:

This is a surprisingly good bun. It is soft, squishy and buttery, without being cloying. It also sucked up a surprising amount of the burger juice without collapsing.

Accessories:

Crunchy chips were excellent, super-crisp pieces of well-salted potato. Mac 'n' Cheese, in spite of its nuclear yellow colour, was pretty tasty, though perhaps could have spent a couple more minutes under the salamander to grill the cheese more thoroughly. 

Overall Rating: 6.5/10. 

This is currently an average burger. It seems the team at BRGR Co have taken some of the early criticism on board and are making moves to improve their offering - the problem is there are SO MANY good burger places not 10 minutes from Wardour Street (Patty & Bun, MeatLiquor, Lucky Chip @ The Player to name but a few) - so they need to up their game to have a chance of standing out. I visited on a Friday lunchtime and it was rammed, so there's no problem with location, but for me to go back, they'll have to up their game.

Have you been to BRGR Co yet? What did you think?

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