Food review: Burger Priest, Wolverhampton

In the beginning, there was the burger, and the burger was... Well, not very good.

It’s fair to say that it has taken the UK some time to truly master the hamburger. Once upon a time, the only options you had if you fancied a tasty burger were McDonalds, about which the less said the better; Wimpy, which was the high street posh burger purely by dint of the fact that it wasn’t McDonalds; and the kind of hot food vans you get at Wolves matches. Not exactly an embarrassment of riches.

Eventually Burger King came along and upped the burger game somewhat, but to be fair they’d have been hard-pushed to make it any worse.

Then The Gourmet Burger Kitchen arrived and changed all that, reasoning that if you were going to be a burger chain, then people might be willing to pay a bit more money and come back for more if the burgers were, you know, actually half-decent. And so burgers got posh. Rather than the embarrassingly perfunctory slabs of meat and processed cheese on offer at high street fast food establishments, you now get things like dry-aged steak, smoked Applewood cheese, onion jam, truffle mayonnaise and – ugh – avocado. You can always count on avocado being there in any posh fast food outlet, ruining it for everybody.

The success of Gourmet Burger Kitchen proved that there was a market for Fancy Dan poshburgers, and indeed the subsequent rise of Five Guys, of which there are two in Birmingham, proved that you could apply the posh burger ethos to a fast food environment and make it work.

Any city worth its salt has at least one posh burger joint in its midst, and it was with this in mind that, a few months back, Wolverhampton invited Burger Priest into its loving embrace. How could it possibly fail? It’s in a prime location opposite House Of Fraser, with a whole load of footfall due to the fact that the Man On The Oss is around the corner and that’s a Pokestop. It’s just what the city ordered, in a brioche bun.

Which is why it’s puzzling that when myself and my dinner date (who I’m pleased to announce is not my parents this time – Burger Priest, with its rock soundtrack and zany ecclesiastical themes, isn’t really a parents kind of eatery) arrived at 8pm on a Saturday, the place was all but deserted – there were more serving staff than customers. It may well be that we were in some kind of post-dinner, pre-chucking out time lull, or that word of mouth hasn’t started working for Burger Priest yet. In which case, I will do my damnedest to help out.

What this at least meant was that we got to take up one of the sofas in the funky interior – there are sofas, regular tables and high-stool diner-style counters to choose from. As we entered, Rosanna by Toto was playing on the music system and I took this to be a good sign of things to come. Largely, I was proved correct.

It’s a fascinating proposition, is Burger Priest, with a menu full of the weird and the eccentric and the occasionally downright loopy. If you wanted, for example, you could feast on something called the Surf’n’Turf Burger, which is six ounces of meat patties on a bun, with lobster tail meat and seafood sauce. Who’s to say that’s not going to work? I certainly wouldn’t know!

Another option might be the Mac and Cheese Dog, which as the name suggests is a Frankfurter sausage on a bun, topped with crispy bacon and – be still my heart – macaroni and cheese. I think it’s fair to say that one has enough stodge for anyone.

My comrade and I decided to play it safe and go for the Altar Burger, one each, which is simply a double-patty burger with bacon, smoked Applewood cheese and all the salad trimmings. You have the option of piling on some extras at no extra cost if you feel the need, which I obviously did, and so I decided to throw in a layer of sautéed mushrooms too – sautéed onions, bell peppers and beef tomato are among some of the other choices.

Now, initially I had intended to just get a burger and fries, but at the last minute I had a rush of blood to the head and decided that my side should be salted beef poutine. Apparently I’d decided that my burger alone just wasn’t going to be meaty enough.

Now then. Poutine. What do you know about it? Thanks to the magic of the internet, I can tell you that poutine is a staple dish of the Quebecois people, consisting of French fries in meat gravy with cheese curd. Chips in gravy with cheese, then. The Canadians, I am told, live for it. Frankly, even as I ordered it, I wasn’t sure about the combination, but my dining partner, who hails from South Wales way, assured me that in her hometown, cheesy chips with gravy is a regular late night meal and that poutine should hold no fear for me.

So we grabbed a glass of wine (Fairtrade, naturally) and took a pew. And we waited. And then a lady came with our burgers and sides and oh me, oh my.

What burgers they are. It seems like Burger Priest subscribe to the American model of meat patty – basically, shape a big lump of beef until it is roughly round and then slap it on the grill with the minimum of frills and let it go. The highest compliment I can pay to Burger Priest’s patties is that they wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Man Vs Food, which is pretty much the highest compliment anyone can pay.

The smoked cheese is, I would argue, the perfect cheese to accompany a burger, and the bacon was thick and rustic. For a burger with such an ecclesiastical name, the Altar Burger is a big, bad, nasty piece of work, and again, that’s a compliment. My one caveat that I had with it – and this is partially my fault for throwing in the sautéed mushrooms – is one that can also be levelled at the burgers at Five Guys, in that it’s so overloaded with stuff that the actual eating of it becomes a bit of an endurance test. Halfway in and the thing started disintegrating, but then nobody ever said that you can’t eat a burger piecemeal. It’s still a burger

But the star of the show, paradoxically for a burger joint, is the poutine – it’s that, I reckon, that will keep me going back to Burger Priest. Gravy so rich that it’s practically black, suggesting a bit of red wine in the mix (and I’ll take red wine in whatever form it comes), swimming with artery-clogging chips, shredded pulled pork, and those lumps of cheese curd, which somehow work like a dream.

I’d really pretty much made up my mind about the poutine before it arrived, but even then I was taken aback by its deliverance of pure indulgent mush. And then I had the idea of dipping my burger in it, thus revealing myself to be a genius.

My second caveat would be that my partner in dine ordered the regular fries and they utterly paled in comparison next to my choice of side, feeling like a bit of an afterthought. Go for the poutine, is what I’m saying. It costs a bit more but you’ll thank yourself for it.

Burger Priest definitely isn’t for everyone – it’s loud, it’s funky, it’s a bit brash and you have to be prepared to literally get your hands dirty. My suggestion to them would be to provide their customers with multiple wet wipes and then they’d be nudging true greatness. Even so, they claim to treat their meaty products with a touch of the divine, and in me, they have a new convert.

Praise the Priest and pass the gravy!