Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Save on Meats

I had the chance to try a couple of new restaurants over the weekend. Remember what I had said previously about wanting to lose weight for my birthday? Yeah okay, that's gone to hell.

For lunch Sam brought me to a much anticipated diner. I'm sure many have driven past it without a second thought. I would not have expected to find a good burger in this part of the neighborhood. But we found ourselves walking along one of the most impoverished areas of Hastings Street to Save on Meats. 

Source: insidevancouver.com
Save on Meats is half butcher shop and half diner. I remember reading an article on how the original owner was closing it down after many years of operation and a new owner stepped forward to revamp and take it over. Walking inside I was surprised to find myself in a very clean, old fashion styled diner. The service was quick and attentive. I noticed they had a hipster dresscode going between most of the servers. 

I enjoyed going through the menu immensely as it was obviously written by someone that had a lot of spunk. I was tempted to settle for a big ol' breakfast, since breakfast is what we usually do. However I was there on a mission. And that mission was the burger. Sam and I both ordered the burger.


It came with a choice of variety of sides, Sam stuck with the good old burgers and fries and I settled with mashed potatoes. The beef from the burger is hand ground and brought over from the butcher shop right next to us. It was a solid burger, figuratively and literally. It was not overloaded with ingredients but had just the right amount and had a well seasoned patty. Turns out Sam is not a picklish person, more for me, all the better. The burger looks a bit small in size but it pretty much decimated us. The bread was a bit dense so it did pack a punch of carbs. Next time I think I will settle for a salad as a side, or something more green to balance it out. We ordered a slice of daily pie as well but we had to cancel it as we could no longer carry on after our burgers. 

Overall, I'd give it a 3/5 burger score. But for $6.95 you can't really go wrong.

Save On Meats on Urbanspoon
V6G 1B4

1 comment:

  1. Hi!

    Interesting post about them burgers; it was solid on all accounts, both figuratively and literally! Har! Har! Har!

    You may want to consider normalization your burger scores, which should help future-proof your blog if you do continue to score more burgers. What I mean is, a $3 burger obviously isn't going to compare fairly to a $20 burger, which isn't going to compare a $100 burger and so on. So what I am proposing is you come up with an algorithm or a formula that normalizes the 'burger score' to the price of the burger; kinda like a bang-for-your-buck score. You may even take into account other factors, but this would be the bare minimum in my opinion.

    If you do decide to take this route, you should also consider the level of granularity and precision. For example, a $5 burger isn't going to be much different than say a $6 dollar burger in terms of quality, especially if it's from the same restaurant. Then if you're using it to the dollar (or cent), your normalized score will favor the $5 burger since it's cheaper. So maybe instead of dividing it with every dollar, do it for every 5 or 10? or maybe it can change and grow as the price grows. Then you have consider would the rate at which it grows, if it grows.

    The above doesn't even take into consideration other factors such as location, size of business, type of meal (lunch? dinner?) etc, which is a whole other level. This is why I stick to the good 140-char posts.

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