Rascals Bar – The Meat Feast Burger

Review of the Meat Feast burger, Rascals Bar, St Andrews

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RascalsBar

What they say: Brioche bun filled with chargrilled beef burger, chicken breast, bacon, minute steak, pepperoni + topped with our delicious pulled-pork!!! With usual sides. Are you ready for this EPIC FEAST?!

Price: £13.95.

So, with this review burgerlad.com finally breaks the international market. That’s right, we’ve ventured all the way across the border to that Mecca of fast food known as Scotland. The specific destination? Rascals, St. Andrews.

Rascals Bar is a friendly sports bar offering a massive range of mouthwatering delights. It is situated pretty close to the town centre, next to a cinema, and whilst I suspect the main clientele are the city’s students, the staff made an ageing 30-something feel more than welcome!

Since you’re visiting this website you will be happy to hear that a large proportion of the menu is dedicated to burgers, but they have a wide selection of various dishes – from chilli nachos to plates of pasta – and they even have an entire menu dedicated to feeding you for £5. Bargain.

Several plasma screens dotted around the pub kept me up to date with the Barcelona/AC Milan score, but had there not been a match to watch, I would have been kept entertained by the plethora of movie quotes and amusing sports photos adorning the walls. In my eyes, there is always a place for a photo of Vinnie Jones crunching Gazza’s nuts. At Rascals, this place is next to a cash machine which charges nearly £2 to withdraw money. Coincidence? I think not!

Rascals appears to have made quite a name for itself by having several food challenges on the menu. These are the typical challenge-type food items: hot wings in a sauce so volcanically-spicy that you have to sign a disclaimer before eating them; burgers so gargantuan that even those with the largest of appetites would be hard-pushed to complete.

The largest of these challenges, dubbed “Papas Revenge”, consists of five 12oz beef burgers topped with eight rashers of bacon, cheese, and more pulled-pork than you could shake a particularly portly stick at. All of this is somehow squeezed into a brioche bun, and then (because that clearly isn’t quite enough food) served with chips, sweet potato fries, ‘slaw, six magma wings, and a cream-topped milkshake. Scary.

Needless to say, this was too much for me to tackle on my own, so “intellect” took charge and I opted for the much more sensible “burger of the week”… Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the “Meat Feast”, a monolithic offering including a 12oz beef burger, a minute steak, a chicken breast, bacon, pepperoni, and the establishment’s much-praised pulled pork.

Oh baby! This was a good burger!

There was an unctuous BBQ sauce in the burger which perfectly counterpointed the dominant flavour of the pulled pork. I say “dominant” here, but this did not detract from the quality of the burger, and the chicken, and the bacon, oh yes, and the minute steak (how am I still standing after this?!). The pepperoni was not a superfluous inclusion either, adding a smokey-depth to the overall flavour, and all of this was just-about contained within a delicious brioche bun.

The chips were good, salad a little on the small side (but it had to be so as to fit on the plate), and the ‘slaw was fine – a little salad-creamy for my taste, but pretty good nevertheless.

Damn fine work Mr Rascals, damn fine work.

I’m happy to say that, aside from a few bits of ‘slaw, I defeated the Meat Feast, however, as I lie in my hotel bed desperately trying to digest this mixed-meat masterpiece, I get the distinct feeling that (in the words of Adam Richman) in the battle between man vs. food there is never a clear winner. Even when defeated, food will exact its revenge whenever possible.

It was worth it though!

So burger lovers, if you ever find yourselves in (or near) St Andrews, forget about golf, there’s only one place to get a decent sand wedge here and that’s Rascals Bar.

Burger Lad®