‘Five Guys Burgers & Fries’ has now been at its home in the Bull Ring in Birmingham for just over 8 months. Up until now we’ve not been. I’d heard a LOT of mixed opinions coming out about it, and decided it was time to see for ourselves. Five Guys has over 1000 locations globally, so thats gotta be good right?
I’d heard stories of queues out the door, waiting ages to order, then even longer to collect food and if I’m honest this is the biggest thing that put me off. I don’t like queuing for food at the best of times. Lucikly on a Tuesday lunchtime, the queue was minimal – waiting only a minute or two to get to the till, then probably about a 6-7 minute wait for food. Not bad, but I still wouldn’t want to contemplate it at the weekend.
I’d also heard horror stories of boxes of peanuts sat a top of the bins..again there was none of this, but I couldn’t bring myself to try the nuts none the less.
On to the food – in basic terms, you choose either a burger/cheeseburger/baconcheeseburger or the hot dog equivalent which all have set prices, then you can have any combination of toppings from the list at no other cost. Chips and drinks are priced as extra.
I had a cheeseburger with grilled onions, ketchup and jalepenos. Lee had a bacon cheeseburger ‘all the way’ which is all of the main toppings (mayo, lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, ketchup, mustard, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms.) Other additions can include relish, peppers, hot sauce and BBQ sauce. We shared some chips and had a soft drink each.
I was drawn in by the self serve Coca-cola drinks machines – literally any soft drink you can think of, the choices were overwhelming! (I don’t do well with choice and ran away with a rather uninteresting sprite zero!) After getting the drinks we watched our food being prepared in the open kitchen – it looked like a (quite) well oiled machine.
The food all gets ‘thrown’ in a brown paper bag. This meant that half the chips ended up in the bottom of the bag which was reminiscent of macdonalds, but at least they were better than Macdonalds chips!
The burgers themselves, I have to admit were good. And in my husbands opinion very good. I like the traditional sesame seed buns – a bit soggy given the foil wrapping, but actually we both quite liked this. You get two patties too which is good. The burgers were dirty, messy and full of flavor and actually we couldn’t fault them. Not the best burgers ever, but pretty good.
I thought the prices were a bit too much for essentially a self serve, food in a bag place. Our 2 burgers, 1 chips and 2 drinks was £26.
All in all though, I think I was expecting worse than I found it from all the opinions I’d heard, but I wouldn’t hurry back (although I think Lee would!)