Hibernian - A very special special

Hopefully like a fine cheese this blog is aging beautifully, although might smell just as bad. Anyway, back from the dead, here I am to serenade you with more tales of red meat! This one comes to you courtesy of Hibernian. The lovely and beautiful K and I decided to have a night out with some friends. We met up with our good friends and OG burger blog veterans D and ML. Initially, this dinner wasn't intended to be a burger excursion, but rather some other form of food. Yes, there are other forms of food that aren't in burger form. Who knew. The plan was to go to this wonderful Irish restaurant and get some fish and chips or bangers and mash or whatever other foods come out of the British Isles. When we arrived, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that Monday was burger special night! Yes, Saint Lawrence of Rome was looking down upon us and blessed us with discounted burgers. For those of you who don't know, that would be the patron saint of cooking. And yes, I totally Googled that to make myself seem smarter. So what heavenly meat was bestowed upon us? Of course, the lot of us all ordered the burger special.

The menu at Hibernian is your standard Irish pub/restaurant fare. I can honestly not remember what was on the menu because we just looked at the burger menu on this particular night. Going off of memory it has stuff like fish and chips and shepherd's pie. The Monday night Hibernian burger special though is a $5 burger that includes your choice of side. Now, that is the base burger, the price goes up from there as you add things but still will get you in way less than a burger off the menu any other night. K ordered her burger with some cheddar cheese and avocado and maybe something else I can't remember. It is so much easier when I can remember a name and look up the menu online as I write, thus making myself seem much less forgetful. What I do remember is what I ordered. I got the burger with cheddar cheese, fried egg, and rasher. I had an adult joke that I was going to write in here about bangers and rashers, but I'll save K any embarrassment and leave that one go. Seriously though, you can easily come up with your own joke there, I'll leave you to it. What is rasher, you might ask? It was listed on the menu as Irish bacon. I asked our waiter what exactly was the difference in Irish bacon and regular bacon. He said that bacon is, well, bacon and Irish bacon is basically Canadian bacon. So Canadian bacon is ham, but Irish bacon is Canadian bacon. Henceforth rasher is ham. Basically, I made a breakfast style burger with fried egg and ham. Ordered medium, of course.

The burgers came and looked fantastic. It was kind of interesting though, because the burgers were not actually one giant patty but two smaller patties awkwardly stacked. Kind of double cheeseburgerish but more like a split-level cheeseburger. Once you started eating though, it was indistinguishable, as you can imagine. My fried egg was cooked exactly how I like, slightly runny, and the rasher was ham. The taste was excellent, juicy and flavorful. Nothing lacked flavor in this burger. The meat was cooked as I wanted, although with it being two smaller burgers it kind of went back and forth between pink center and brown edge. Kind of like eating a marble meatloaf, if there is such a thing, which I imagine there is not. The rest of the table concurred that the burger was highly acceptable of praise, putting this burger up high on our ratings list. Even the fries were delicious, preventing me from using any Irish Potato Famine references.

So the final word on these burger platters? I highly recommend, gladly labeling this burger with our 3-1/2 burger rating.We wouldn't say it is to the level of some of our higher rated burgers, but we would definitely go there again to indulge ourselves. Especially on a Monday.  So thus ends this edition of Burger Time, and as the Irish say, a turkey never voted for an early Christmas. Whatever that means, I found it on a Google search. So long friends, may God be with you!

Hibernian Irish Pub & Restaurant
8021 Falls of Neuse Rd.
Raleigh, NC 27615
(919)803-0290
https://www.hibernianpub.com/

Bull City Burger and Brewery - A Bunch of Bull

So yeah, I know I have been scarce and everyone has been eagerly awaiting my newest burger blog. I had no idea so many people liked this so much. I'm flattered. But not as flat as the taste of this next burger. So read on to find out the tragic dinner outing. At least we were in good company.

On a dreary and drizzly Friday night we packed up the fam into our trusty SUV and headed to downtown Durham to get some grub. Of course, I may say trusty, but my family may say otherwise. At least it is the most trusty of all of MY vehicles. But that's not the story at hand. We were visiting Bull City Burger and Brewery for one of her coworkers going away party. Never to pass up an opportunity for a burger, I decided to join along with the boys. I had never met this coworker before, but she seemed nice. I am sad to see her go. The restaurant and bar is a nice looking place inside. Big long wooden tables and benches and a rustic kind of feel inside. Or maybe it is vintage industrial. There was a lot of wood so I guess it depends on if you are a rural or urban person as to how you perceive it. We walked up to the front and ordered our burgers. This is where it starts going off the rails a bit. And no, I don't mean try to get my family decide what they actually want when they are on the spot. J-Train, C-Monster and the beautiful and lovely K all decided on the Over Easy Burger. This was a cheeseburger with bacon and a fried egg on top. While this is normally my kind of go-to burger I decided I'd go a little different and went with the Shadoe Burger. This is a burger with Pimento cheese, vinaigrette slaw, and Chimichurri. I had no idea what Chimichurri was, but it kind of sounded like chalupa and I knew I liked those. I ordered a beer while the rest of my family ordered sodas while all of our burgers were ordered with fries. Then came the shocker, it was around $70 for the four of us. I questioned it and he read it back. Sure enough, $70. Now, I really like burgers. I mean, REALLY like burgers. For $70 though, it better be less burger and more ribeye. After the sticker shock, we got our number and went to our seat.

This is where we found the best part of this place. The sodas. They have a fountain with a brand I didn't recognize, but it had sodas that you don't normally see. I don't remember all of them, but they had cola, root beer, black cherry and birch beer. Yeah, they have BIRCH BEER. For my northern constituents, when is the last time you saw birch beer at a restaurant? I mean, we won the war and it took this long to get it down here? I may have stolen some sips from the boys sodas, but I was also enjoying my Honorable Bell's Big Brown Ale. Not a bad beer. Oh wait, I didn't have my beer yet at this point. I was digging into my burger before I had to stop and go ask them where my beer was. But those burgers....here's where it left a bad taste in my mouth. Or rather a strong taste for me and no real taste for K. Our burgers were cooked correctly, but the flavor was off. I think I figured out what Chimichurri is, if it is a garlic soaked disaster. I couldn't taste anything past the garlic. I felt like I was eating a giant garlic knot in the shape of a burger. Now, I enjoy a good garlic knot, but I also enjoy kissing my wife and the more I ate the more I felt my chances of that slipping away for the night. I guess some of the reason I only tasted garlic was that the burger was flavorless. I realized this after I tasted K's burger and realized it only tasted like ketchup. "You soaked it in ketchup?" I exclaimed. She responded that she had to because that was the only way she was going to get any taste out of the burger. She was right too, I tried some of the burger sans ketchup and it was almost flavorless. Actually, you know how you taste something and it tastes like something smells? I once told my dad that my food tasted like Pool City smelled. He looked at me like I was nuts, although that is also a common look people give me. Anyway, this burger tasted the way raw meat smells. It was cooked, but to me it really tasted that way. Or course, the boys both thought their burgers were ok, but they also lack years of burger tasting experience. I also didn't poll K's coworkers, because some of them I just met and asking "hey, did your burger suck too" didn't seem appropriate.

So here's the scoop on this downtown Durham establishment. Unless you just want a beer, find somewhere else. The upside of this was I met a lot of K's coworkers who I hadn't met, so we had a great time. The downside was the price and the burgers. Since this is a blog about burgers and not people, I'll go ahead and give my verdict on this one. I am going to bestow a one and a half burger rating on this flavorless meat. I would say it is about on par with Chuck's Burgers although the fishy taste was replaced with garlic. Now, I do like the taste of garlic more, but the high price on top of it seals it as a one and a half. So if you do decide to go visit Bull City, be sure to bring friends. At least you'd be entertained.

Bull City Burger and Brewery
107 E. Parish St.
Durham, NC 27701
919-680-2333
http://www.bullcityburgerandbrewery.com/

Might Have to Reevaluate

Uh oh, some changes may be coming to the Burgertime Blog. Right around Christmas time we visited the Angus Barn with some friends. The beautiful and lovely K and I split the burger as usual and............it wasn't that good! My world was rocked. Everything I had built up was a farce.

Or maybe not. We are going to have to go back again for a reevaluation. I, of course, will report back with my findings.