‘Very nearly very good’: Smashin’ Burger, Mount Pleasant Food Market, reviewed

There’s a lot of students in Liverpool. A lot.

And while a diet of instant ramen, pasta and cheap lager has been sufficient fuel for generations of intrepid young minds, they do occasionally like to branch out and even spend a bit of that maintenance loan. 

Around the corner from Unite Students digs is Mount Pleasant Food Market, an efficiently sized and cosy unit neatly carved up into rooms with a large dining area out the back. 

Up the steps and to your left is Zaman Crepes and Coffee, a quiet and comfortable spot, and to the right is Safi’s Desserts, so that’s the sweet stuff covered. 

But this was lunchtime, and sweet stuff at 1pm is, in my book, utterly insane. When you’ve got the craving what’s better than a burger?

It’s fair to say the trend for smash burgers has been, gone, come back around and stuck its heels in this time, seemingly here to stay. 

I personally prefer them as a style to the hockey puck thick patties every single place served for what seemed like an eternity. ‘We make our patties slightly bloody’. Hmm, I’d rather you didn’t. They were near-impossible to finish, and often you didn’t particularly want to. So the switch to ground beef flattened under a Victorian clothes iron has well and truly happened, planted its feet and stuck its elbows out. I for one am glad. 

Burgers are one of the great inventions of the food world, but then you’d say trainers are a blessing to the world of fashion and there’s plenty of shockers out there. You have to try them on first, and so to Smashin’ Burger.

First and foremost, it’s a very reasonable price. I got the meal deal of £11.90 for any burger, a drink and skin on fries, all of which shouldn’t make too much of a dent in any finely balanced budgets. 

I chose the Classic Double Stack, reassuringly named and complete with pickles, American cheese, lettuce and burger sauce. It’s not reinventing the wheel, and it doesn’t have to. That, some chips and a sugary cup of what should now by law be called ‘Full Fat Coke’ and you have pretty much everything you need.  I was given a buzzer to let me know when it’s ready, and I took a seat out the back. This is probably the best asset that Mount Pleasant Food Market has. It’s not enormous but certainly spacious enough for the hordes of hungry, or hungover, students to come and hide away from the world, or cram chaos theory, or break the back of Jude the Obscure. Or just have a burger.

I sat on the upper level among the Sicilian lemons and rose-strewn bicycles, a strange choice of decoration but very effective at helping you forget how close to Lime Street you are. A haven is what Mount Pleasant was seemingly set up to be, and it does it well. 

The buzzer buzzed and I went inside to collect. It’s an effective system, saving on you standing in a queue or awkwardly milling around waiting for your order. You simply sit and wait.

It’s a tidy trio when all laid out on a tray; burger wrapped in foil, fries piled high, and a cup of the browny-black good stuff. You’ve always got to try a chip first, surely? Skin on tends to make for better chips in my mind, there’s more for the rolling oil to cling to and crisp up, and that was the case here, a solid set of fries given a decent dusting of cajun seasoning.

Now the burger itself. If you take each constituent part and give it the star treatment then it can make for something that’s truly more than your average run of the mill burger. There’s plenty of opportunities; the choice of bun, how much cheese is too much cheese? Judicious sprinkling of pickles or so many it seems almost sarcastic? And finally, do you slip a slab of tomato in it? Personally, I would say no. 

Smashin’ Burgers went with the tomato and that’s fine, it’s easily remedied, no harm done. The choice of bun was bang on, the heavily-seeded top, the slightly sweet, faintly briochey and quite supple bread that can withstand two patties. Far better than those bready, barbeque buns that fall apart on contact with anything of substance. 

The patties themselves were certainly of a good standard, well seasoned and with those crispy edges that is surely one of the most enticing aspects of smash burgers - you just don’t get that with a hockey puck. The American cheese - the sort that would survive a nuclear blast - was melted well onto the patties and did its job, binding the whole thing into what you know and love.

Their pickle game needs improvement, though. The ones I did find were those mealy-mouthed pickle impersonators, window dressing. You want fat cuts of astringent, soaked pickles with these types of burgers, the vinegar playing off the fatty beef. Again, easily remedied. The burger sauce could lean heavier on the dill, again a matter of contrast, otherwise the whole thing is too straightforwardly beefy. 

All in all, though, a more than solid burger for a price that plenty sell some very sorry imitations for. With a few tweaks and a bit more bravery when it comes to pickles and burger sauce, this could be a very good burger, the sort you keep to yourself so you’re not queuing up every time. Oh and drop the tomato, only oddballs enjoy those in a burger.

As it stands Mount Pleasant Food Market is a well-balanced affair, not trying to be too many things (three is hard enough already). I feel it made the right choice in making smash burgers the savoury option - not many people dislike burgers - and what they do they do well. But they could do them even better with just an extra bit of invention. And more pickles. Lots more pickles. 

Smashin’ Burger, Mount Pleasant Food Market, 62 Mount Pleasant, L3 5SD