Restaurant
Gaby Soutar takes a delivery from Butta Burger, Edinburgh
Actor Vincent D’onofrio put on 70 pounds to play Leonard in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Apparently, that’s the biggest ever weight increase for a film role.
I’ve often thought about what it’d be like to get paid to plump up. Sounds fun, but I imagine it might take the greasy shine off eating lardy treats, and you’d eventually feel a bit like a foie-gras-chugging duck.
I was reminded of this when watching foodie centrefold pictures of one-month-old Butta Burger’s wares, which were littering social media.
Oozing cheese, giant schnitzel-like pieces of chicken in buns, milkshakes and crispy bits of bacon. Oh my. I imagine this would be a one-stopshop for enthusiastic method actors.
Apparently they baste the inside of their burgers with seasoned butter, hence the name and the slogan; “Everything is better with Butta”.
They could have added a Bernard Matthews style “bootiful” in there too.
In the midst of the pandemic, this place was set up by former nightclub promoters and food lovers, Simon Bays and Graham Atkinson, who currently operate from a takeaway and collection only premises and operate exclusively through Deliveroo. However, as orders have been 50 to 60 per cent higher than anticipated, there’s already potential expansion in the pipeline.
After the recession in 2008, loads of burger places sprung up, and I wonder if something similar will happen again post-covid, in a drive towards affordable comfort food.
Although he wanted the Smokey Q (aged beef patty, crispy fried onions, marrow mayo) or the Reuben (aged beef patty, salt beef, American cheese, pickles, burger sauce), I made my plus one have the Truffle Steak Frites (£10.50). It features one of their 35 day dry-aged beef patties – slim, rather than chunky, and with a rich and smoky chargrilled flavour – a smudge of truffle dip and one of marrow mayo, as well as a handful of pale skinny fries, all sandwiched in a soft and sesame seed sprinkled bun.
It was fancier than your average burger, though still pretty feral.
My Kiev (£10) number consisted of a 24-hour marinated baseballmitt-sized chicken escalope, which was coated in a craggy, crusty, ultra-savoury and salty fox brown buttermilk batter. There was a little grating of Parmesan on top and the see-sawing piece of poultry was harnessed to its bun with a slick of cumin-spiced black garlic dip.
I’d accidentally bought an additional pot (£2) of this slick sauce, but it didn’t go to waste, as we also had to contend with a helping of their three cheese fries (£5.50).
These were different from the skinny numbers that had come with the burger. They were fatter, and lashed tightly together with an orange mixture of melted mozzarella, cheddar and crispy Parmesan sprinkles. It was like an edible papiermâché project.
Pure filth, in a good way, as was the “Buttamilk fried chicken wings with chicken gravy mayo” (£6). However, I think they’d forgotten the gravy mayo, or maybe it fell out of the delivery person’s bag and is being lapped off the road by a very happy dog.
They don’t do sweet stuff at this place, presumably because you’d have to be an eating machine to get that far.
I did, however, manage a few dainty sips of their palate-coating cherry pie milkshake (£5.50). I hoped this wouldn’t end in a scene similar to the blueberry pie munching competition in Stand by Me, but it would serve me right for overeating if it did.
Anyway, it was more delicious than I wanted it to be – thick, malty, ice cold, and with a melted ice-cream texture. They’d had to transport it with layers of cling film over the top, so it wouldn’t slosh everywhere, and, as if it were molten gold, they’d managed to not spill a precious drop. I appreciate it guys.
After munching myself into oblivion, that’s me a tad closer to be cast in an all-female take on Full Metal Jacket.
Everything tastes better with bootiful Butta.