Cheddar and bacon burger at The Bull, Rugby
At the weekend I went to Shropshire for a friend’s wedding. It’s the least densely populated county in the United Kingdom and one hell of a drive from south-east London. By the time we reached the Midlands, after being stuck in Friday afternoon traffic for some time, we were hungry and in desperate need of both caffeine and some facilities. Knowing the horror of motorway service stations only too well, we agreed to pull into the next town, park up and stop for lunch. This is how we came to be in Rugby.
Neither of us had ever been to Rugby before, in fact all we actually knew about it was that it was the birthplace of Rugby football and home to a rather posh school. A quick google of ‘best restaurants in Rugby’ on my iPhone yielded nothing interesting, so we instead decided to take a punt on the first restaurant or pub we came across. This is how we came to be in The Bull.
It must be POETS day in Rugby as at 2.30pm, the pub was packed. After we squeezed past the gaggle of smokers, the group of guys playing the fruit machines and the display urging us to Book Your Christmas Party Now, we found a table near the back and started on the menu. Despite having a complete hatred for the term, this menu offered proper ‘pub grub’: pies, fish and chips, strange vegetarian concoctions clearly devised by a carnivore, nachos, nachos and more nachos. It did, however, offer two meals for £6.95, and the allure of ordering two meals and two drinks and getting change from a tenner was too tempting for we who live in the land of the five pound pint. A cheese and bacon burger for £3.50 (with chips) was either going to be a huge mistake or the bargain of the century.
In fact, it was neither. I confess that I did not have high hopes for this burger in this unassuming little pub in the Midlands, which made me pleasantly surprised that it was actually fairly decent. Of course, it was never going to be of the standard of the MEATLiquor, Patty & Bun et al., but it was not as disastrous as I’d feared. For one, the bun was brioche and pretty decent; it held everything together well and didn’t disintegrate in the way that many of the cheaper buns do. The patty was fairly thin, so was cooked well done all the way through, but it was well-seasoned and tasted quite nice. A rasher of bacon and a few slices of melted cheddar were a perfectly decent topping, in fact, the only modification I made was to remove the red onion. Not a great burger by the standard of what we are used to in the capital, but OK.
I think I always have this idea that anything that is not a gourmet burger is going to be terrible. Of course, it is often the case, but I now allow myself the liberty of being pleasantly surprised from time to time.
The Bull, 28 Sheep Street, Rugby CV21 3BX
Six Hundred and Seven Square Miles 