Restaurant Review: Gourmet Burger Kitchen

Hannah Mcnamara tests out Canterbury’s new burger joint: Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Did the franchise’s burgers sizzle or flat-out burn? Here’s what happened…

It was Saturday night, the end of Freshers’ Week, and my housemates and I were feeling particularly sorry for ourselves. We were all in various states of being hungover and suffering from a heavy dose of freshers’ flu – it was a sorry state of affairs. House morale was at a definite low. Thinking it would cheer us up, and not wanting to wait until Monday (loan day) for a hot meal, we decided to go out for dinner.

Living just off the high-street, I had seen earlier in the week a sign outside Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) offering 25% off for students – clearly, the dream. All I could think of was sitting in a clean, warm, and well-lit restaurant as opposed to our currently mouse-infested and damp student house, where every surface seemed to be sticky with alcohol residue. Braving the busy Saturday night local crowd, my remaining two housemates and I managed the five minute walk to the restaurant, enticed by the myriad scents of food wafting towards us.

We arrived at GBK at around 6pm, early as we were expecting it to be busy. On the contrary there were quite a few empty tables and the people already sitting down seemed pretty subdued; surprising for a Saturday night. We loitered by the front desk for a few minutes with no sign of anyone coming to seat us, and so we walked down into the main section of the restaurant.

After waiting down in the main seating area for a few more minutes, and after several waiters had walked past us without any acknowledgement, finally we were able to grab someone’s attention. We then asked for a table for three people and he appeared confused; I had to ask a second time for him to realise what it was we wanted – surely what any customer walking into a restaurant on a Saturday night wants? At this point I was fairly unimpressed with how we’d been treated so far; it wasn’t even as if the restaurant was busy enough to warrant the lack of attention we’d been granted. Already grumpy due to my freshers’ antics taking their toll, this poor service had made me even more irritable.

Keen to order, I went up to the cashier, where my housemates and I were devastated to discover that student discount was only offered Sunday-Thursday, which obviously we hadn’t been aware of. I begrudgingly parted with more money than I had planned on spending, not improving my mood, but luckily our food came pretty fast. And it was good! But considering how much I had spent for what was essentially a burger, with chips served only at an extra cost and in a weirdly tiny metal bucket, I was again unimpressed. We ordered the refillable drinks to ‘save’ money, but unsurprisingly no one came to our table to offer us the refills once we were finished.
We left the restaurant in even lower spirits than we’d been in when entering; a bad mood that was heightened when, on exiting GBK, not a single person working there paused to thank us or say goodbye. Overall, we didn’t have the pleasant housemate meal that we were planning on at all. The food was decent, but probably not worth what we paid for it. If you are planning on going make sure you go on a night that the student discount is actually available, and don’t expect much from the service either!

Gourmet Burger Kitchen is located in 49A St Peter’s St, Canterbury, Kent and open till 10.30pm every night besides Saturday, when it stays open until 11pm. Find out more here.