Restaurant Review: GBK (Covent Garden)

A colleague at work raved to be about Gourmet Burger Kitchen, and as I love a good burger (I’ve eaten three McDonald’s this week), I couldn’t wait to try the place out. However, the experience turned out to be a massive disappointment, although the quality of the burgers are the least of GBK’s problems.

The manager in charge, Felipe, was one of the most sullen men I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. Now, we all went at around half sixish, so I guess some could allow if he was at the end of a long shift, but I don’t buy that. He chose to work in a restaurant, which is by nature a very people-ccentric job, so he should be smiling and nothing less than totally obliging until the end of his shift. And if he didn’t pick that job? Well, tough. It’s the recession and he should be grateful to have any job. And being grateful doesn’t incorporate glaring at us as we came up to make our orders, rolling his eyes as  we conferred over what it was we wanted exactly, and then, most annoyingly of all, knowing we had a card that would allow us to have a discount, but pretending not to know and purposely misleading us so that we ended up paying more. What a dick!!

The food itself was fine. We all had the Taxi Driver burger, which was lush – it had onions, tomatos, onion rings, and a healthy dose of cheese and quarter pounder in. The skinny fries were a treat and the extra onion rings we ordered also went down well. The milkshakes were good but horrendously overpriced – four quid for a drink? You can get a whole McDonald’s meal in that.

But the main thing that let the whole GBK experience was Felipe the moody bastard, as well as our waitress, who also misled us, but this time, I believe it was due to her own incompetence rather than wilfully trying to con more money out of us than Felipe died. Nonetheless, as someone who works in a restaurant, she really should know the ins and outs of the place’s menu a bit more, just sayin. It's a massive shame -- the burgers were out of this world, and I would have loved to be able to focus on its fabulous taste. Instead, we were too busy seething over how badly Felipe had mistreated us and the well-cooked burgers became a mere sideshow, never a good thing in a restaurant.

Needless to say, tip, we most certainly didn’t. In fact, it was rather ironic that in a place called GBK I wanted to do a bit of GBH to that fucker Felipe.

Grade: F