The Crown Burger - 17/30

The Crown Burger came to my attention via the always entertaining Man vs Food show, in which intrepid food journo Adam Richman travels the US in search of outrageous food challenges and great places to eat (think Extreme Fishing with Robson Green, but with food). Crown Burger is basically a small chain of fast food restaurants around the Salt Lake City area. Their speciality is burger topped with a fistful of hot pastrami...

Crown Burger is basically a 6 strong chain of fast food joints. No pretensions at gourmet here. I ordered at the counter and then watched about 20 Mexicans assemble my order. Without the pastrami and thousand island sauce, this would have been only a step up from a standard Burger King. With, however, it earns itself a solid two step leap.

The burger itself was fine if a little on the thin side, but the pastrami was excellent; hot, tender and well seasoned. Standard burger chain shredded iceberg and serve yourself ketchup/mustard on the side. The thousand island style sauce I was sceptical about but it actually worked really well adding a smooth, fruity yet slighty spicy lift to proceedings. The seeded bun held together well given the huge job it had to do, compressing down to not bulk out the bite too much. Onion rings were breaded, really good and hugely portioned such that they defeated me (or maybe it was the beef overload). Fries were good and chunky, but oversalted and a bit 'meh' in the sense of not being very potatoey (like KFC - if only they could sort out their fries to BK standards).

And so we score; remember, 0 is for not present, 1 is merely functional, 2 is adequate, 3 is good, 4 is really good and 5 is OMG-can't-talk-eating.

KBI-1 : Quality of Burger	2 / 5
(Beefiness, quality of cooking, not getting lost in the extras)
KBI-2 : Distinguishing Features	4 / 5
(i.e. The 'headline' variation e.g. Bacon, Chilli, BBQ)
KBI-3 : Ability of Bun to Maintain Order	3 / 5
(size, freshness, flavour, keeping it all together)
KBI-4 : Condiment Enhancement	2 / 5
(variety, suitability of extras)
KBI-5 : Fries Counterpoint	3 / 5
(portion size, crispness, potato-ey ness)
KBI-6 : Other Supporting Actors	3 / 5
(quality of side orders)
Total Score	17/30

So, in conclusion, the Crown Burger comes within 2 marks of the Cricket Burger off the back of its headline Distinguishing Features but was let down by merely adequate fries and an ok burger. A classic case of allowing the main event to overshadow the little details that could have made this great.