Taking a break from the roast-dinner-rush of Sunday lunchtime, The Cow, a spacious bar/ restaurant in the heart of Seven Dials transforms their evening kitchen into a cheap and cheerful burger joint from 7pm onwards. Most importantly, all burgers are 2-for-1, so at 8pm on a Sunday night when Aldi is closed and food supplies are dwindling, going out for dinner suddenly seems like a guilt-free option. They’ve kept the menu simple: classic beef, spicy chicken, and a butternut squash/ chickpea medley for vegetarians.
It becomes clear that The Cow is a place for burger purists. There are no halloumi or caramelised onions additions available here, and a side salad is described appetisingly as “leaves” at the bottom of the menu. However, not every restaurant needs to follow Burger Brother’s menu in order to serve up a good meal to hungry students.
All burgers are priced at £10 without chips that are available at an addition of £3.50. We opted to share three portions between a group of six, but with the arrival of our food around fifteen minutes later, we soon learnt that this order wasn’t quite enough. The burgers are small. Not obnoxiously small, but small enough to wonder if you would have perhaps felt hard done by if you had payed the full price on another day. Taste wise, it’s obvious that The Cow’s kitchen uses good ingredients. The beef patty is cooked rare, proving that it’s most definitely fresh, and the meat is seasoned well. The chicken burger is deliciously spicy without being overpowering, and the butternut squash option gets a thumbs up from the happy, albeit unfussy vegetarian in our group. The burger sauce however tastes suspiciously like ketchup, and the chips are a definite let down. Abruptly finishing our conversation about picking up “snacks” from the Co-op on the way home as the waiter comes out to collect our empty plates, he asks us about our meal. “Cheaper than MEATliquor,” he says. Yes, cheaper than MEATliquor, but arguably less good, and definitely less filling.
