The Burger’s Priest

2nd Location at Yonge & Lawrence

Despite how much we’ve hated this place, we decided to give them a second chance and go to their new location to try out their signature burgers.  The burgers that everyone is raving about – The Priest and Vatican City – including Toronto Life Magazine and the Zagat Survey.

Their second location on Yonge north of Lawrence

Even though it took an hour via TTC, trying out the new location was another reason why we revisited The Burger’s Priest.

The crowd inside The Burger's Priest

I think it is worth mentioning that this crowd was at 1:00 on a Thursday (what’s it like there at noon when most people have lunch?) and at one point people were lined up outside the door.

The Vatican City

This is how Toronto Life Magazine describes this burger…

Where: The Burger’s Priest, an all-American burger joint that’s evangelical about meat. 1636 Queen St. E., 647-346-0617.

How much: $10.

The meat: Two four-ounce patties made from a custom blend of premium beef, freshly ground in-house every hour and cooked to medium.

The cheese: Each juicy patty is topped with a slice of wonderfully trashy processed cheese.

The bun: Two artery-clogging grilled cheese sandwiches, each made with more processed cheese and a no-fuss white bun.

The fixings: Forget about newfangled toppings. The options are puritanically standard—ketchup, mustard, mayo, lettuce, tomato, pickle and onion. Fried onions are $1 extra.

Maybe it was because we had low expectations going in but this was NOT the train wreck me and my mom thought it was going to be.   I think what Burger’s Priests’ strength is their use of oddball and/or trailer-trashy ingredients.  The taste of the grilled cheese sandwich is what made this burger.  Take that sandwich away and you are left with a pile of scrap metal and train parts (remember the train wreck from earlier?)… an obviously over hyped burger that no one was talking about in the first place; their basic cheeseburger.

The Priest

This is their regular burger plus their “option”, mushrooms stuffed with cheese and then fried.  Despite what we said on our first visit to The Burger’s Priest (at Queen & Coxwell) the cheese was melted and therefore tastier instead of the floppy grease puddle.  That said, I find it hard to believe that these are beef “patties”.   They are more like ground beef clumps thrown onto the bun so the meat keeps falling out of the burger.

Overall The Burger’s Priest is a lot better than we originally thought, but certainly NOT the Burger of The Year or Third Best Restaurant in Toronto.  The Zagat Survey consisted of  2,266 people voting on 315 restaurants.  Miniscule compared to the actual population of 2.5 million and the 10,000+ restaurants in Toronto.  I would not eat this again because the taste does not overcome how unhealthy these burgers are and its just not worth it.

The Burger’s Priest 3397 Yonge St (North of Lawrence)

C5 Restaurant

Just like my Big Daddy’s…. review, this is another restaurant we tried out via Winterlicious.  In the same building that has the C5 Restaurant there are also ancient artifacts and taxidermied  animals.  Can you guess it?  It’s the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum).  I have no idea why they named it C5,  they should have named it after something that compliments the museum.  The restaurant was probably not too happy when the ROM was (I think deservedly so) named the 8th ugliest building in the world.  We wanted to try out this restaurant because Corbin Tomaszeski is their executive chef.  He’s a Food Network star who’s been on Restaurant Makeover and is now on Dinner Party Wars and we wanted to see how one of these Celebrity Chefs actually cook.

Inside C5 looking back towards the bar area

Even though the outer crystal looks like an alien lifeform trying to eat the ROM, the inside is actually quite pretty.
As it is at the top of the ROM, C5 has spectactular views of downtown Toronto.

Their Winterlicious Menu

As you can see, a lot of the ingrediants are much fancier than what we usually eat.  A lot of this is the kind of stuff you would see on a FoodTV show.

Beef carpaccio

As it turns out I hated all of the ingredients in this.  I’ve  never tried black garlic before or completely  RAW beef.  I also don’t like herb-like ingredients as a central flavour profile.  And personally I think the cheese could have used a bit of a stronger taste as the garlic and greens overtook it.

Mom's appetizer - Cauliflower Soup

Since I hate cauliflower, when I had a sip of this soup it made me gag a little bit. But that’s the cauliflower, not the soup.  My mother said it was “nice” but it could have used some pepper.  I thought that was a good statement and probably would have agreed with her if I actually liked cauliflower soup.  However, there were  no salt and pepper shakers on the table.  Maybe the chefs are paranoid of people messing up their flavour profiles, but any decent critic knows you don’t season the food before you taste it.

Main course - Chicken Pot Pie

For me this was definitely the best part of the meal.  It had a flavourful gravy, delicious crust and large pieces of tender white chicken meat.  I think one of the problems when eating out is getting food that is so super heated you have to wait a long time before you can eat it.  This dish was pleasantly warm and stayed that way throughout the meal (my mom said it was because it was baked in a “tureen” , which sounds alarmingly like “latrine” to me).  The only downside of this dish was that the vegetables (not the side salad) were so bland that I didn’t even notice that they were there until my mom pointed them out.

My dessert - Panna Cotta

In a nutshell the Panna Cotta was nice but I wouldn’t order this from here again until I had tried some of their other desserts; because it was not better than average.

Mom's dessert - "Peaches & Cream"

Just so you know, “Peaches & Cream” translates to buttermilk shortcake with preserved peaches.  I think this dish should be named “Conning You Out of Your Money”.  There is no reason why anyone should pay for this dessert; it was dry and really small.  When I saw a waiter walking by with this I thought it was a free appetizer, like the bread that sometimes comes to a table (no kidding).  My grandmother makes an Upside Down Cake that is 100 times better than this.

Even though this is only our second post on higher end restaurants, it is clear that my Winterlicious experience has a continuing theme regarding “Rich People Food”.  Obviously we have a different palette than people who are used to all these luxury ingredients.  All of these are food network/Iron Chef ingredients ie eggs that are so rare they might as well be DoDo eggs, and the ever occurring Arugula that doesn’t miss a single episode of Chopped.  So far we think it was a waste of our money.

 C5 Restaurant 100 Queen’s Park

Big Daddy’s Bourbon Street Bistro And Oyster Bar

Despite what the incredibly long name would suggest, Big Daddy’s Bourbon Street Bistro and Oyster Bar is a Cajun restaurant.  A place like this would usually be out of our price range, but we used a thing called Winterlicious.   This is a city sponsored program to bring clientele to the restaurant hot spots of Toronto.  You make a reservation with one of the participating restaurants and when you get there they have a fixed price menu for you to pick from.

Prix fixe menu for Big Daddy's..

For me the menu choices was pretty much a no-brainer. But first let me show what the restaurant looks like.
Unlike most of the restaurants we visit which are either in an ethnic neighbourhood or around our area, this was downtown in what my mom told me was the  “Entertainment District” (which I thought was closer to the beaches area).

This is just a part of the interior, its way bigger than this

We actually noticed a lot of details that we aren’t used to in other places because Big Daddy’s is much fancier than our usual choices.  Don’t forget, my mom is really cheap.  We were very excited by the cloth napkins and the paper doily under the teapot.  I also noticed that the glasses were a bit fancier.

Free bread and butter

Even the bread and butter is fancier. Notice that the butter does not come in little plastic containers with peel off tinfoil.

Popcorn Shrimp with Smoked Tomato and Pepper dipping sauce

Of the many things I like about this appetizer: the shrimp was very fresh tasting and not mushy.  I also liked the nice light batter (not greasy) and the delicious dipping sauce.

Jambalaya

The meat was the saviour of this dish.  They were generous with the sizes of the pieces: the chicken was so tender that a man with no teeth could have eaten it.  Big slices of andouille sausage was just plain delicious and was the only spice in the dish.  Nice big pieces of shrimp but only one or two for each serving.  But the sauce could have definitely used more flavour.  I’ve never had Jambalaya before so I don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like, but mom said this wasn’t it.  It wasn’t horrible though, just quite tomato-y and not much else.

Big Daddy's Bourbon Beignet

Long story short, this was excellent. I loved the chocolate sauce (I was scraping the plate to get it all), powered sugar and donut-like beignet itself.  These would make for the perfect Sunday breakfast.

I’m not sure if I would like to eat here again.  Mainly I would like to try some other Cajun restaurants and see how they compare.

Big Daddy’s Bourbon Street Bistro and Oyster Bar 212 King St W