Gourmet Burger Kitchen is newly opened fancy dine in burger joint that opened exactly where
Hamburger Nation used to once be in Muscat City Center. Wednesday 1st of July marked as their first opening day, and with the seriously attractive teaser advertisement they had on their spot before opening, things looked very promising from back then so you can imagine how busy would they be on the peak hours of they're first business days.
When i went to GBK, it was around 2.30 pm and that place was completely packed with people and there were a couple of others waiting outside to grab a table. At lunch time it's a long shot for you to walk in and directly find an empty table. We waited for around 15 mins outside and then got a table for three. The interior design of the place is pretty good, not over the edge special, but i like it. Things were a bit messy though around cause the place was just way too packed, but still fun to be within the crowd.
The menu is not short on variety, there are some unique starters, plenty of chicken and beef burger options, salads, veggie burgers and cold along with hot drinks. The prices of the starters vary between 2.250 Rials to 3.000 Rials, and the Fries start from 2.100 Rials. The burgers are pretty pricey starting at around 2.900 Rials for the burger only with nothing on the side. What i liked about the menu is that there is and item from each category marked as recommended by GBK, it really makes it easy to enjoy the best of their line even if its your first time and you blindly walked in.
We first ordered two Lemon Mint drinks (they were marked as recommended), each was for 1.650 Rials, they weren't anything special, i would have rather tried something else honestly.
We ordered Skin On Fries for 1.250 Rials and starters in the beginning and then ordered our burgers. The fries came around pretty quick, and then we waited for a pretty long while and the burgers actually came to the table
before the starters. We ordered Baby Grilled Burgers for starters, those were for 2.550, and ordered Grilled Chicken Cajun for 3.250 Rials, Blue Cheese Burger for 3.550 Rials with extra Mushrooms (0.500 Rials) and Bacon (1.000 Rial) for a total of 5.005 Rials and a BBQ Burger with extra Bacon and Mushrooms as well for a total of 4.900 Rials.
No doubt about it, the burgers are more than delicious as I expected when i walked in, my Blue Cheese burger was just huge, juicy and tasted so good! I used to always say that B+F RoadSide Diner has the best burgers in town, but now that i have tried this burger at GBK i must say that i enjoyed it better here even though things got really messy with me and i had to use a crap load of tissues. My brother had the BBQ Burger and said that it was very good, tasted really nice and it was juicy and mouthful. It does go up to and above the average tasting burger from the ones he ever tried but can't say that it's better than the burger he went for at B+F RoadSide Diner, they're almost the same, can't pick out the better one.
After we went half way through our burgers, we asked the waiter to see what happened to the starters we ordered, 5 minutes later he comes over and gets us
Baby Beef Burgers instead of the Grilled Chicken ones we ordered. We didn't feel like complaining nor wait any longer since we waited enough for everything to be served anyway, so we passed on it and just had them. They were nothing special at all, even though they were recommended by the place itself, perhaps it would've been a different story if we actually started off with the starters instead of having them between the main course and the end.
Now for the big shocker, when we were done and asked for the bill (it took them a REALLY long while to get it too), we got it and we took a look at the blue cheese and BBQ burger's prices, and they were around 10 rials each! They actually charged us 7 rials for extra mushrooms and bacon for each burger, thats twice the price of the actual burger! We asked to see the guy who took our order (Took him a good literal 7 mins to come to our table too) and asked him to revise with his manager about the problem we had. In the end they changed everything and charged 500 Bizas for the mushrooms and 1 Rial for the bacon, the final total came out to be 22.180 Rials.
As a conclusion, the whole experience was heroically saved by the sweet taste of the food because everything else was a disaster, there was no music around, the service we pretty slow, we got wrong orders coming to our table twice asking if we ordered this, we didn't get what we exactly ordered and we were charged triple the price of a normal burger. Would i go there again? Perhaps, as long as they sort their mess out and raise their service quality a bunch, otherwise i'm only in for a take away.
Labels: Food, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Muscat City Center, Oman, Restaurants
