Moka Burger, Dhs40
6/8
Sautéed mushrooms? Are we in Paris? Indeed, Moka has some interesting ideas – bread and creamy dipping sauce while you wait; thick, juicy burgers, and an oily side salad. Alas, the roughly hacked chunks of cucumber which weighed down our patty were a definite negative and we weren’t asked how we wanted it cooked (they just intuit). However, tasty fries, a salad heavy on the olives and simple convenience (right there in Abu Dhabi Mall) make this a superior snackery.
Verdict: The Oliver Twist of burgers: raised in humble surroundings, but worth picking your pocket for.
Café Moka, Abu Dhabi Mall
City Burger, Dhs28
3/7
Being the cheapest of the bunch, simplicity (and wagon-wheel-sized hunks of onion) is the motto of this buffet diner. But it feels wrong; the atmosphere is not burger-friendly, and the staff are simply confused. After asking how our patty should be cooked (medium rare), we were just ignored, and what arrived was grey, dry and unfriendly. Plus, there was little in the way of condiments to ease our pain. Cheap, but you get what you pay for.
Verdict: Time to leave the city and head home
City Café, Al Maha Arjaan
The one gourmet Burger, Dhs42
6/7
Err, it’s in the furniture store, right? Yep, but no finer café is to be found in the city. Quick service and a side dish of peppers added that extra frisson. Bun density (that’s the scientific term) was high, but the burger itself was thicker than an X Factor finalist, so it didn’t matter. The only thing inhibiting patty perfection was the frankly slimy smattering of oily carrot and potato chips. However, burger-wise, it was only a crown and sceptre away from starting its own monarchy.
Verdict: Forget the furniture, grab the meat
The One Café, Khalidaya
Quarter Pounder, Dhs40
3/7
A soundtrack of indie hits from the ’90s, and a crowd more British than Churchill playing a Union Jack guitar provides the background for these burger specialists. Sadly, the service is not very fluent, and ‘medium rare’ was interpreted as ‘well done’. However, an insane amount of additions (we went for stilton and jalapeno peppers) and then the option to flavour it with garlic, barbecue, plain or Cajun makes this a jack of all burgers. Sadly, the result is a bit wayward and rather sloppy, but stump up an extra Dhs55 and you can get the full pounder burger. Worth an extra point in itself.
Verdict: All things to all burger eaters, but we’d prefer a specialist
Heroes, Crowne Plaza Hotel
Black Angus Burger, Dhs98
2/7
Abu Dhabi’s most expensive burger (circle pic) needs to come served with gold leaf napkins to justify the extortionate price. Needless to say, it doesn’t. It’s a hefty heifer – so heavy, in fact, that it buckles under its own weight and quickly becomes a palatial mess. We’d give Le Café an extra star for their world-beating French fries, but man can’t live on spuds alone, and no one is going to live very long at these prices.
Verdict: All show and no go. Plus, we’re now broke
Le Café, Emirates Palace
Angus Burger, Dhs41
7/7
The atmosphere may be a little staid, but it’s worth braving a wee bit of formality for ‘The Angus’ – you owe it to the beef. A stately burger of imperious quality; we asked for medium rare and it arrived cooked to perfection, gherkined up to the eyeballs, and with chips so chunky that you want to take them out back and talk to them about their life choices. The icing on the cake was the dinky Heinz tomato ketchup bottle – even the condiments had class. A decent price and simply the best burger in Dhabi.
Verdict: Other burgers weep in shame at the sight of it
Café Columbia, Beach Rotana, Abu Dhabi
Mini Burgers, Dhs60
4/7
The most peculiar dish you will ever see. The aim of Eight Bar and Restaurant is to be a bit exclusive, so somewhere along the line, someone thought: ‘Hey, why don’t we serve three bite-sized burgers with different sauces on an elongated plate’. This should be a terrible idea, and yet, when sat on the stylish balcony, feeling a wee bit princely, you don’t look quite so mad while eating your tiny burgers.
Verdict: We admire their vision, but not the price
Eight Bar and Restaurant, Souk Qaryat Al Beri
Old Fashioned Burger, Dhs40
6/7
Desperate Dan, the burly protagonist of UK comic book The Dandy, loved nothing better than his humongous cow pies. As a child, we used to marvel at the size of the things, wondering how one man could ingest so much cow. Here, a lifetime of pondering came to an end. This burger is such a vast creature that it took two men, we observed, to wrestle it onto the kitchen hotplate. It only took one man to finish it, though he may never eat again.
Verdict: For those about to rock, we salute you
Rock Bottom Café, Al Diar Capital
Quarter Pounder, Dhs54
4/7
Framed in a substantial bun with plenty of raw veg and relish, this is a wholesome, meaty burger that sits just right on an empty stomach and gives no call for complaint. Move beyond the burger itself, and you’ll find the chips a little disappointing – a little less oven-friendly would be nice – and the atmosphere very similar to the dish itself. Straightforward and unpretentious; this is the Status Quo burger that Dexy’s Midnight Runners can sing along to.
Verdict: A decent tribute act, but we prefer the real thing
PJ O’Reillys, Le Royal Meridien
Texan Beef Burger, Dhs65
4/7
‘Papa’ Hemingway’s exact relationship with burgers is something not recorded in the vast backlog of literary works he left behind (shame), but he was a big boy, and this is an alpha-male burger by anyone’s reckoning; so, we think he’d approve. Jalapeno peppers scattered among the salad give the option to spice up the rather banal barbecue sauce and bog standard fries on the side, but just getting your mouth around its, err… buns, is a task in itself. It also passed the medium-rare test with flying colours, losing marks only for the price.
Verdict: A definite page turner, but we just weren’t man enough to tackle this monster
Hemingway’s, Hilton Abu Dhabi
Meat Co Gourmet Burger, Dhs58
5/7
How would you interpret the word ‘gourmet’? Would it involve a huge slab of pineapple, dry beef bacon and plenty of cheddar cheese? For all it’s lack of subtlety, we feel the need to quote Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction: ‘Mmmm, this is a tasty burger’. Indeed, and they get extra points for the onion rings (or oniony batter, to be more precise). Fundamentally, it’s a heart attack in a bun, and gets a bit sloppy, but it was cooked to perfection and the chips were the best we had, so we didn’t mind paying that bit more.
Verdict: Pineapple doesn’t belong anywhere but on a toothpick sandwiched between two cubes of cheddar cheese, but the chips are five star
The Meat Co, Souk Qaryat Al Beri
The Oldtimer, Dhs28
2/7
The name doesn’t exactly get the mouth watering, does it? Once you’ve banished the image of a senile, geriatric cow in a nappy going on and on about World War II, you can get to grips with this manageably proportioned yet impressive-looking burger. However, you’ll soon discover that the oldtimer’s schoolboy error of slathering American mustard on the bun – underneath the meat – makes the base unacceptably soggy and prone to disintegration. That undoes all the good work done by the moist, pink, flame-grilled meat, cheese and slices of dill pickle. Shocking.
Verdict: There’s no school like the old school, and this doesn’t even come close
Chilli’s, Khalidaya; Al Mariah Cinema, Al Nadja Corner
The (Err…) Healthy Option
Veggie Burger, Dhs30
1/7
In the denizen of the unhealthy (where even the air is morbidly obese), burgers the size of small planets are de rigeur, as are customers slurping from troughs of Pepsi. You can attempt to avoid a heart attack with a plain old veggie burger, but the healthy option does come complete with its own bucket of diet soda. The burger has a vaguely nutty essence, and that’s about all there is to say on the matter. With mid-’90s pop phenomenon Aqua in permanent rotation on the CD player, this might well be hell on earth.
Verdict: Enough to turn you carnivore
Fuddruckers, Marina Mall
Tropical Chicken Burger, Dhs30.50
4/7
Two sturdy chicken fillets come glazed in a tikka sauce, topped with a juicy pineapple ring, dressed in a bagel and bell-pepper out-coat. It’s a colourful sight, and mighty tasty to boot. A scattering of chunky chips provide ready support, and – if you get there between dinner rushes and take a seat by the window – it’s not a bad joint, as chain cafés go.
Verdict: Hang on a minute, isn’t this really just a chicken sandwich? Lose one star
Mugg & Bean, Abu Dhabi Mall
