The Meating Room

SUMMARY
Great food and great service from a team that really care about burgers. Fantastic flavours. Highly recommended. Great job!
REVIEW: THE MEAT OF THE MATTER!
Date: 7 June 2014
Location: The Meating Room, St Albans
Burger: Cheesburger (Emmental)
Burger Price: £7.95
Overall Score: ⁸⁄₁₀
Bun: ⁸⁄₁₀
Sweet but light, seeded brioche bun. Normally I don’t like too sweet a bun but this had a lovely sweet contrast to the tasty patty and was a good compliment to the overall flavour. It’s a great choice of bun.
Sauce: ⁷⁄₁₀
The sauce was good, but a little light for my taste. It would have been great to have an American mustard to lift it but unfortunately they only had English would would have been a little too powerful. American mustard would lift the overall flavour and give a more rounded sauce, especially given the fantastic taste of the patty.
Patty: ⁹⁄₁₀
This is the centrepiece of the whole meal. I thought I was eating a piece of steak at times, it was that good. The owner tells me that they use a secret blend of cuts, including topside, and they buy direct from the abertoir. The grain of the mince was excellent and it is clear that the patty has not been overworked, keeping it tender and moist.
Flavourwise, this was a sublime piece of meat. Well done chaps. Amazing job. The only reason it wasn’t a ¹⁰⁄₁₀ for me was because the burger was still incredibly moist when it arrived which caused it to drip a lot, saturating the bum. Perhaps it hadn’t rested for quite long enough, it would have been a flawless 10 otherwise (and since when was a juicy burger a bad thing anyway!!).
Garnish and Construction: ⁷⁄₁₀
A nicely put together burger with the patty and cheese sitting atop the salad garnish. Sauce is only applied to the top bun (which is sensible because the bottom bun is at serious risk of flooding with a burger this juicy.
For me (and this is personal) but a burger isn’t a burger without a pickle and there wasn’t a ghurkin in the house, sadly. My plea to the owners is please give us the option. The taste of a pickle dipped in burger sauce is the essence of burger-​flavour (try this experiement at home, it works) so please let us add one to your fantastic burger if we want. Otherwise, great! The garnish was excellent. Too often we see limp and lifeless ingredients lurking under the patty but not so here — buoyant, vibrant salad with good crunch and colour. Try the tomato on its own. It has flavour. Who would have thought that was possible in the UK these days.
Service: ⁹⁄₁₀
Warm, fast, super friendly and extremely knowledgable. These guys really care about their customers and are happy to have a chat too. This is the great value of independent restaurants. They aren’t filled with salaried employees supplicating to a stock-​market-​listed corporate deity. They are sparsely decorated with human beings with passion, interest and a genuine desire to see people enjoy the fruit of their labour. Long may it continue.
Décor: ⁸⁄₁₀
Despite being small they have brought an interesting industrial twist to their dining room which works well. From the tiled opening that looks straight onto the grill, through to the network of shiny copper trunking linking the glowing filaments of their incandescent bulbs the whole concept works well and makes for interesting viewing whilst you wait for a delicious meal.