Maybe it was nostalgia; perhaps a dedication to heritage and my personal history persuaded me to travel 2 hours to Yah So. I read through the menu online where Google said “website,” the click returned a pretty cool-looking menu sheet but no website. Nonetheless, I was excited to try the Yardie Dutty Burger (which, for the unadvised audience, is patwa for Jamaican Dirty Burger). Here’s how I got on.
Before we start, a quick side note
I have always wondered about the success of Chinese, Indian, and Italian restaurants compared to their Caribbean counterparts. Consider the culinary excitement at Notting Hill Carnival, where all races clamor over Jerk Chicken. For some reason, Caribbean restaurants have never entirely managed to muster the same success in independent ventures. I have tried many places in London for Jerk Pork, Jerk Chicken, and Curry Goat; in fact, I have driven as far as Manchester. I have always been disappointed by the service! Perhaps there is something in Caribbean nature that says “Hey, I am serving you, just be cool and shut en ou mouf” – No, that’s my parents – but same attitude. However, the food typically bares some semblance to my childhood, along with the attitude.
The Bun – 11/20
Maybe the likes of Hawksmoor or Burger and Beyond have made me a bit of a snob when it comes to buns. I can’t say that Yah So had a terrible bun; it was just slightly above average compared to some of our other bigger hitters. It was a decent brioche that lacked a little bit of softness to say the least. Perhaps it had been left out in the open for a couple of hours pre-cut, or it was just a day or two out of its peak. Either way, the quality of the bun was negated by the disappointing freshness. These oversights in the detail lend themselves to our very ranking criteria: The bun is our goalkeeper, never really the hero, but always noticed if it’s having a bad day!
The Toppings: 1/10
With a lineup of gherkins, onions and mango salsa, I was genuinely excited to take the first bite out of this stack. For some reason, however, they managed to swerve the gherkins, and mango salsa, and hit me with a ton of thick cut tomatoes, and a piddly plantain on a stick. Number one, if I wanted a fruity looking burger with a plantain umbrella, I would have wore a Del Boy hat and asked for one. Missing gherkins, and the mango salsa is like taking Steven Gerrard out of the Liverpool team at their best, big mistake. Replacing my gherkins with thick cut nasty tomatoes is like giving Liverpool Declan Rice as a replacement (safe, but not a move forward!). Yes, as you can probably tell, I am still a little angry now.
As it happens, I ended up just having onions in the stack because I do not like tomatoes, and the plantain would have caused an uneven bite due to its size. At least give me 3 plantain so I could actually position them around the beef!
The Condiments – 3/10
The jerk mayo actually had a bit of punch to it. But, for a seasoning that is supposed to be rich in pimento and scotch bonnet, it was underwhelming. I could taste a bit of the jerk but not as much as I would have liked. Baring in mind that the jerk mayo and mango salsa are probably the two things that separates this burger from a regular old burger. The Caribbean’ness that should have been won in the condiments and toppings was lost in translation. Sad really, but one of those things that I have come to expect in infusion burgers of late.
The Cheese – 19/20
The cheese was one of the stars of the show for Yah So. It was a smoked applewood cheese that oozed quality. It was well melted and offered plenty of flavour to the stack and did well to outshine the jerk mayo, which typically should not have been possible. The cheese had a rich, deep flavour married with nuanced smoke at the back of the throat that was delightful. So much so in fact, I would have been happy with just a cheeseburger, no sauce, nothing. This cheese is a winner, so kudos to Yah So for offering something with a little bit of character to the Yardie Dutty Burger.
The Patty – 10/20
I have come across so many patties having conducted over 50 burger reviews on Cheeseburgerme. One of the things I have come to realise is that if you are going to serve up a thick patty without any smash, it needs to be meaty with deep flavour of beef. Anything outside of that, and the patty becomes somewhat of a concrete block with sauce on top.
The Yardie Dutty Burger did have a flavour profile in the patty but the overcooked beef was tough to get through. I could taste the beef, which was pretty nice, but had been cooked to a grainy texture that had dried out cracks in the meat. I would have liked to taste the beef with a little of it’s own meat juice to really give any feedback on the quality of the meat. Without that, I was left with a burger with larger than life cracks after bites that took away from what could have been pleasurable. That being said, it was still better than many of the patties I have tried, which does say to me that there is some quality in the beef.
The Taste – 13/20
After what feels like a pretty scathing review so far, the taste was actually pretty good! It was saved by an outstanding cheese that even managed to balance the fire angry chef in the kitchen. The jerk mayo did okay to offer some sort of heritage in the underperforming fusion burger. Three massive tomatoes, incongrously fisted on the heel of the stack shows a lack of understanding of how to stack a burger. I mean everyone knows that by putting too much moisture on the heel causes the bun to fall apart, don’t they? (There goes the snob in me again). Overall, Yah So did okay to offer something a little different, but nothing that punched the flavour I was expecting.
Our Verdict: 57/100
Scores on the doors tell the story accurately in my opinion. Yah So have offered a burger that performs slightly above average against most other spots I have tried. Unfortunately for me, it is another story of Caribbean oversights in their food that takes away from the quality it threatens. At £16.75, this is not a cheap burger, and if I wanted to grab something average there are several places more preferrable.
I joke with my wife about going to Caribbean places to eat. It has become customary to walk in, grab a menu, then ask “Can you tell us what you don’t have.” We are so frequently disappointed with ordering something from a menu to be told, we don’t have it, or it’s finished. Understandable, to some extent, when you are cooking big pots of food, like Curry Goat. But, to not have the raw ingredients to stack a burger as you have promised is incredible. Even more so when my wife orders Curried Prawns with Mango Salsa, and gets her salsa. Like, if you have none, that is one thing. But, to charge me £16.75 and not even bother to stack my burger as it should be, unfortunately is typical of so many Caribbean restaurants.
