Burger Joint, Amoy Street

So we finally managed to visit Burger Joint (#01-03, 115 Amoy St, tel : +65 6221 8648). With a reputation as a somewhat game changing poorly kept secret from NYC, we had expectations. We expected to be impressed to some degree.

I'll skip further introductions since some has been written or talked about them. I've heard that they've kept the ingredients pretty much the same as the original so I'm guess it's still that Nebraskan Black Angus that they've brought in for the meat here done at an 80/20 coarse grind.

Here's my double cheese burger. Just onions and pickles and no sauce. I needed something to cut through the meat and mayo/ketchup doesn't quite work for me. All the pickles I got ended up at the other side of the burger. For people that are serious about their burgers, I find the lack of attention to this detail disturbing.

I had it medium. In retrospect, medium rare might have been a better choice. This ended up looking more like medium well. The beef was nice but just that. I'm not buying their reason for not salting the beef and justifying that by saying it would cover up the quality of the meat. In fact, I thought having salt would enhance those qualities. But what do I know?

The main salt in the flavour came from the cheese. Again if the ingredients have not been messed with, it's white cheddar and Colby. Melts nice, tastes pretty good but not heavy hitting with the salt. Unlike American cheese which is pretty much what makes things tick for me at McD and Omakase Burger. Forgive the comparison to the former. I just needed to bring it up. 

In contrast with the burger which was light on the salt, the chilli fries hit hard. Lego Batman hard with heat and salt and more than a little grease. I was still burping those flavours a few hours after this. Some of those fries were a little hard. It wasn't bad though.

There's boozy shakes on the menu. This one had Baileys. And not enough of it. For the cost of two of these and less than 10 bucks, I could have gotten a whole bottle of Baileys at DFS. Not impressive.

I guess I needed to give this a verdict maybe because I like burgers as a whole and I had though this might have been a good joint. It's kinda expensive. As much as I have accepted that things generally just become more expensive once it emerges in our sunny island, I didn't think what we had represented good value. And while it didn't cost as much as my current favourite burger, Burger Joint also certainly wasn't anywhere close to edging it off that number one perch anytime soon.