Shooters Sports Bar – The Show Stopper Burger

Review of The Show Stopper Burger from Shooters Sports Bar, Cheltenham

Website: http://shooters-cheltenham.co.uk/downloads/Shooters_Food_Menu.pdf

What they say:

This is a real mouthful! A beef burger stacked with grated mature Cheddar cheese, rindless back bacon, BBQ sauce, battered onion rings, mixed leaves, tomatoes, red onion, mayonnaise & side of your choice.

Price: £6.95 including side.

Shooters Sports Bar can be found on the High Street in Cheltenham and is a split-level sports bar offering big screen and projector football, pool tables, table football and my personal favourite – a gourmet burger menu.

The menu has a large selection of great sounding burgers and hot dogs including the ‘Spicy Mexican Burger’ – described as a succulent beef burger with Cajun seasoning, peppered rocket, jalapeños, tomato salsa, Cajun mayonnaise & side of your choice. At £5.95 you can see why this is a popular location for students, and beer & football loving sorts.

Four of the bWo arrived at the bar, settled into booth seating (always a plus) and after a few rounds of drinks decided it was time to choose something off the menu. With a name like ‘The Show Stopper’ (and with bacon, onion rings and cheese) I thought to myself……..“yes please”. Now I will be honest, I didn’t really expect much more than a burger van standard meal but after a relatively short wait my hopes were raised.

The first thing I noticed about this basket of brilliance were the fries. I’m a big fan of black pepper and these were liberally sprinkled with the stuff. The flavour was spot on, they were crispy and a perfect sized portion to accompany the self-proclaimed Show Stopper.

Onto the burger…..This came in the classic sesame seed bun and had a generous topping of two slices of bacon and two onion rings. The addition of BBQ sauce makes this a classic performance and the bun coped well keeping all of the ‘actors’ on the stage. I do believe they missed off the cheese though. Oh well.

As you can see from the pictures the Show Stopper was built with salad at the base – the fresh red onion cut nicely through the sweetness with its sharp tang. I’d asked for the mayo to be left off in this instance as I didn’t see it marrying well with the BBQ sauce.

The burger itself was actually surprising as it had a good, meaty flavour which didn’t disappoint. You worry that with all the other ingredients added it is a ruse to hide the quality of the main event but this wasn’t the case. I wouldn’t quite go as far to say this is a Show Stopper of a burger but it certainly was enjoyable and good value.

I liked the 70’s flashback of serving the meal in a basket and the ‘Shooters’ branded wax paper was an amusing touch – I think I’ll look into some www.burgerlad.com alternatives in the future, available to order soon!

Apologies to David Attenburger – we don’t seem to have a picture of yours and due to “one or two” pints can’t actually remember what you had.

What we have learnt tonight is that you can’t park in Beechwood after 6:30pm and he now knows how to hold his phone properly for the video which is available here…

Shooters Sports Bar in Cheltenham might not be ‘gourmet’ but it’s certainly a lot of fun with some pretty good burgers! If you fancy a few drinks, some football and a good priced burger then you won’t go wrong popping into Shooters (not to be confused with Hooters!).

Burger Lad®