Burger 320
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This is the first year Kev and I attended Beakerhead, a week-long city-wide festival that celebrates engineered art. It did not only engage ingenious engineers, artists and scientists to showcase their talent and creativity, but also brought a whole new experimental dining experience to Calgarians. This year, creative chefs were called upon to explore a specific theme – eggs!
Looking through the list of participating restaurants in Engineered Eats, I recognized a burger place that we hadn’t explored yet – Burger 320. On top of that, it invented an intriguing, egg-citing dessert that made me curious to know how it tasted!
Situated right across Blue Star Diner in Bridgeland, the bright red burger outlet is one of the projects rolled out by Chef Mario. In a space of only 320 square foot, you can witness many of his creativity comes live!
All the burgers there are made with fresh local farm ingredients including brisket that is ground daily on-site from locally raised beef. One thing that will definitely catch you eye is the fresh-baked, branded buns 🙂
The space in the restaurant is predominantly taken up by the kitchen workstations and a gelato freezer. Given its limited capacity of seats, most customers order take-outs. During peak hours, the restaurant could get rather intimate!
The menu is short and simple. You have a choice between standard vs signature burgers, along with fries, mushrooms or poutines on the side. If you have a sweet tooth, gelato is on the list as well!
Though the egg-themed dessert was my main goal that day, we ordered the burgers just to try them out.
Kev ordered the cheese burger ($9) that could be deliciously customized. His burger was served up with local cheese curds, tomato, onion, mustard, ketchup, arugula and garlic aioli. Knowing that how much I love fries, he added on parmigiano garlic fries ($5 for small). Everything was packaged into a convenient takeout box.
As delicious as everything sounded, the burger tasted rather ordinary. The ground beef patty, melting cheese curds, fresh tomato and arugula combined well to give the burger great flavors, but not that unique. Same for the thick-cut fries that were topped with freshly grated Parmesan cheese and a dose of garlic. The most unsatisfying factor was the puffy, dry buns.
cheese burger
Though my cayley burger ($10) came with roasted garlic chicken, turnip & carrot slaw, sriracha aioli and arugula, the combination tasted pretty plain. There was a hint of tart and tangy taste from the slaw and some bitterness from the arugula. But that’s it. With the sriracha aioli, I thought it would add spicy hot flavor to the burger, but it turned out to be disappointingly bland. I had to look for alternatives to spice it up. Some seasoning salt and pepper weren’t such a bad idea.
Let’s put the burgers behind and move on to the dessert! The Towering Inferno ($8) was inventive and had all the goodies that girls looooove. Dense, moist red velvet waffle, topped with sweet chocolate Italian gelato and torched meringue. Lastly, a flaming egg shell for cool visual effect! Contrary to the burgers, the sweet dessert had us captivated! Too bad it was only offered during the Beakerhead week 🙁
the towering inferno
Given the utterly mediocre burgers, I don’t think we would come back again. However, I would like to mention that the staff were all super friendly. If they offer desserts some day (other than gelato), we will definitely pay a visit!
