Dinner at Mad Grill

It's a Mad Mad Mad MAD burger

Bill
€€
Per Person €22-4 per person. Shared starter, main, shared dessert. 2 beers.

Location
On the net


In Short
Hopes? Something better than our most recent burger experience.
Reality? Excellent food, potentially excellent experience.
First Impressions? It's a bit overlit. Bulbs in bike wheels above.
A USP? Bespoke burger range™ promised.
The food in three words? Bespoke burger range™
Can they get the staff? Lots of them, efficient and well-timed dish deliveries.
Service with a smile? Mostly!
Would you take your friends? Would work for some.
Rating for a dating? If burgers make for dates.
Tip? 10% ish.
Change one thing? I'll pass on the Mad sauce
Going back? Possibly wins out over probably.

Compare and Contrast
Steakburger Luchana.
Bululu coffee and bar.

In Pictures
On Google Images

In Depth
Let's add a new bespoke burger bar to the roster. Mad Grill's got lots of very good things going for it. There are details to mention, so we'll break with tradition and get them out of the way. Quickly then:

• Be ready at opening time.
• Ask if customers have reserved. They should mention it (we admit, we didn't), but check.
• Know your stock. Running out of a house bottled beer happens (and merits a sorry), letting us order an alternative that's also out (at which point the sorry arrived) doesn't look good.
• Everyone should look pleased to see customers. There were lots of warm greetings and we got some pleasingly fun banter, but there was some monosyllabic coolness too.

Hopefully that didn't hurt, so on to the good news.

`twas a very chilly and wet night after Christmas and we were on the dot at 2030. Staff looked startled, Customers? On time? It happens. They fiddled with furniture. We decoed the decor. Lots of white painted brickwork and one exterior door left open didn't warm things up rapidly. Bicycle wheels suspended as lampshades? Very 2017. So it's distinctive, but not the warmest space to walk into. 

A table was on offer, the menu arrived a mite grumpily. Passing on the standard chicken starter suspects, we opted for a bowl of chilli. This turned up very quickly, could have been hotter - another 30 seconds in the microwave - but came with a generous bowl of corn nachos.



Foregoing the plates, we spooned. The chilli onto the chips, of course. Clearly homemade, with chunks of tomato lurking within, it was well spiced, although could have had a smidge more kick for us. An excellent sharing starter, this is just a couple of garnishes away from a main course and might, with a little adapting, lend itself to widening the v-options. Very good.

Pleaesed with the starter, onward. Pulled pork sandwich and Smokey Burger. Two generously proprotioned plates of food arrived very promptly. Not the only PP I'd say was an acquired taste, Pulled Pork's usually just too sweet for me, but this had good quality cuts of meat, with an acidic cabbagey filling which balanced them well. A big gold spike of pickled cucumber would have fitted a burger better, though.

Said burger came in a terrific brioche bun, which passed the test - tasty in its own right, I scoffed the lot. There's a new rule in the offing:

Better buns mean tastier burger bars. 

The meat, properly al punto as requested, was enveloped in a megablob of smokey mayonnaise studded with crunchy bacony bits, making it look uncannily like a giant poached egg. I'm not sure how smokey mayo is made (with this?). It was good, tasty stuff. 

A good portion of freshly cooked skin-on chips came with both. This leads us to an excellent detail. A lettuce-tomato-onion garnish is on the menu but not reflexively plonked on the plate. If you ask for it, there's no extra charge, and, like as not you're intending to eat it. But it's less likely to go to waste this way. We applaud wise ideas like this. Well done, Mad Grill.

Two quality main dishes, then.

More smart details. Bottle carriers are put to good use, both advertising stocked beers and tidying table sauces. Lurking within was something labelled Mad Sauce. Startlingly like English salad cream, memories of grim childhood summer Sunday afternoon salads surfaced all too readily. Pickled onions and boiled egg for tea, anyone? Well. I wasn't crazy about the Mad Sauce, but flashback free it may well work for you.

Dessert. All too often, it's where the ice-cream cone of hope drops from the toddler's hand of fate into the wet sandpit of doom. But you may know the fourth rule, and, fanfare Alberto, it holds true. A key lime pie had a moist, no, not moist. It had, and we've been waiting for this moment, it had a buttery, biscuit base. Ahhh the media mash up link. It feels soooo good. The pie was suitably refreshing and citrussy too. A decent portion size wasn't sullied with spray-o-foam aerocream or chocolate syrup-gunge either. Good decision.

Service was efficient, but not as spontaneously cheery as you'd hope. First impressions count. I don't know what I did in a previous life to the person who sat us down but they didn't take to me at all. Then I made sure we'd never exchange Christmas cards by asking for two brands of beer in a row that weren't available.

Some very good food and staff who had got out the happy side of the duvet redeemed matters, which is no bad thing. But. But? But...

You see, we liked the place and enjoyed it, overall. The food's intelligently thought out, there are smart touches and it's worth the money. Those of a V-persuasion will find a falafel burger, which seemed to be it, so definitely work needed there to widen the client case. There's the (now) standard extensive range of beers with odd names: draught, bottled, and, hopefully, in stock.

It's details that hold it back. Correctable details.

So, Mad Grill.
Try it?
You'd be daft not to consider it.
And if it's gonna survive, it's good to get a little crazy.

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