Sometimes, meals surprise me. I travel a fair bit and try to venture outside the hotel where I’m staying to have food adventures, but every once in a while, the comfort and ease of eating just steps away from where you can rest your jet-lagged head is too tempting.
So I wasn’t expecting a Texas-sized offering when I ordered the Scottish Beef Burger as part of an Edinburgh hotel’s set menu: two courses and a glass of wine for a fixed price of only 15€.
I must have been a little homesick to choose a burger, don’t you think? Unless I applied the label of “surf and turf,” it didn’t seem go at all with the surprisingly good, foodie-worthy first course, which was poached smoked trout with a celeriac remoulade, apple salad and venison Scotch egg. That’s right, dear Foodie Readers, a venison Scotch egg: delicious, innovative, not something you find on a menu every day.
As it is in Texas, the first course could’ve been the whole meal. Then when the burger arrived, I was astounded by its size. I was starting to think I was back home in Houston!
There were two giant slabs of bacon on this epic burger, enough for a meal in themselves. Y’all know that UK bacon is Super-Bacon, right? The cheese was strategically melted over the bacon and topped with dark, slightly sweet cartelized onions. I literally never expected a burger to be this good in a hotel, much less a hotel in Europe. I’m not a snob, just a little inexperienced—I only have a burger about once a year, usually in the Southwest United States. Although there was that one other burger in Edinburgh…the Butcher Bad Boy Burger. My colleagues and I make it a point to seek out the Butcher Bad Boy every time we’re in Edinburgh. Maybe burgers are a thing in Scotland???
So thank you to the Apex Grassmarket Hotel for my fabulous impromptu surf and turf meal, and giving me faith once again in hotel restaurant meals.
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