As arguably one of SA’s most influential and widely-read bloggers, I was invited to the first Burger King store to open in South Africa so I could taste a Whopper before the official launch on Wednesday.
That’s right. While you poor basterds were eating some mediocre left-overs for lunch at your desks, I was being treated to a grand tour of SA’s first Burger King by the CEO himself, Jaye Sinclair.
After the tour we were invited to place our orders for anything we wanted off the menu, so naturally everyone went for Whopper combo meals. Everyone except your Tiger pal. He upped the ante and went for a DOUBLE-Whopper combo and wow. He left a changed man.
First, a word about the restaurant itself. The new branch has opened up at 33 Heerengracht, it’s two stories of burger-nomming goodness; here’s the vibe downstairs:
Upstairs it’s a full-on restaurant that has this really cool mural on the one wall that looks like this:
The new branch also includes a whole lot of awesome entertainment for kids like PS3s for example:
A flippin BASKETBALL COURT!
And the best feature of all, behind the kiddies indoor jungle gym / play area there is a room where interactive games are projected onto the floor.
The games change randomly and there are apparently 1 000 different ones loaded into the system. The games are played by stomping different things projected onto the floor like sheep:
Or sums:
The room can also be hired out for kid’s birthdays and custom games can be made for these special occasions, so that’s a pretty cool added benefit.
During the tour, the whole issue of not having bacon on the burgers was raised, but Jaye was very straightforward in his reply – by including bacon products on their menu, Muslim and Jewish customers are immediately being excluded from Burger King.
His aim is not to discriminate against any of his customers and obviously including bacon on the menu contradicts that imperative. They’re looking into including macon on the menu as a bacon substitute, which I think is totally legit.
Anyone who’s tasted macon will tell you in a second that it’s very difficult to distinguish it from the real thing. Look at Butler’s Pizza – not a scrap of bacon on any of their pizzas, they use macon instead and it tastes pretty damn amazing (heads-up to Sean Stack for pointing that one out to me – holla!).
Once the formalities were over, we proceeded swiftly to the counters and ordered our burgers.
Here’s what that looked like:
Finally the big moment was upon us. With trembling hands, I opened my DOUBLE-Whopper box and carefully extracted my burger from the paper sleeves they are served in (purely so we could get a good photo. The idea is to eat the burger IN the sleeve to minimise messiness and the chance of your fingers smelling like burger for the rest of the day).
I opened my mouth as wide as I could and, like a shark chomping down on a small fishing boat, my eyes rolled back into my head as I sunk my teeth through layer upon layer of burgery goodness.
The flavours of the burger started mingling and meshing with each other, flooding my senses in a wash of grilled patty, creamy mayo, crunchy lettuce and tangy gherkin flavour notes that sang like a choir of angels in my mouth.
I swallowed. Things got emotional. A single tear ran streaming down my cheek. I was in burger heaven.
I greedily washed the burger down with the medium Pepsi that came with the meal and then turned my attention to the “medium†fries that came with the meal, the only disappointment in an otherwise perfect combo experience.
I made the rookie error of thinking that I wouldn’t need a large combo as I was already having a DOUBLE-Whopper and as a result was given a tiny portion of fries which was sad because they were perfectly deep-fried – crunchy and salty on the outside and immaculately soft and fluffy on the inside (just like your Tiger pal).
All-in-all though, I’d rate burger King better than McDonalds and definitely on a par with good Steers (it varies from branch to branch) in terms of quality but here’s the kicker, price-wise it’s WAY better than the competition (a Whopper meal will cost you a paltry R39.90, proof follows below).
So all that’s left to do is get your ass over there when they officially open tomorrow and get ready to experience a whole other level of burger-nomming goodness.
Tiger out.
-ST
