Zsa Zsa Burger

Berlin, DE
www.zsazsaburger.de



The Order:  The Daffy Duck.  Fried duck with hoisin yoghurt and plum dip.  Lettuce, tomato onion and pickles on the side.  Choice of sour dough (mistranslation - should be white) or whole wheat.  No choice of how to cook the duck (-1).
Side Order:  Comes with home fries and cole slaw
€11,30
Drink Order:  Heineken (on tap! - Woo Germany!)
Burger Menu Rating:  7/15




Located in the northern part of Schöneberg in Berlin, and right near the Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station on Motzstrasse, Zsa Zsa burger sticks out amongst its surroundings, especially at night.  All around are tattoo parlors and leather shops, and not a single one of them are open past 7pm.  There are a couple other restaurants or cafes scattered around that are open, but none are so brilliantly lit up, or quite so trendy as Zsa Zsa is.  As you walk into the brightly lit restaurant, you're greeted by sparsely adorned walls, mirrors, antique odds and ends, and a deer skull.  These kinds of stylings are all the rage in Berlin these days, as trendy cafes pop up all over.  Mostly, though, they're all cafes and coffee shops.  In Zsa Zsa we have a burger restaurant.


Look how fancy this place is.

Zsa Zsa is clearly catering to both foreigners and German natives (they give you forks and knives in a bucket on the table so you can make your own choice).  As we sat down, we noticed three different parties of English-speakers scattered throughout the restaurant, so they're definitely doing something right in that regard.  Whether that's because their website is in both English and German from the get-go, or for some other reason, is unknown to me.  The menu is also both in German and English, and starts off slowly with the usual classics, but then things get crazy!  You've got your hamburger, breakfast burger, mexican burger, and Blue Cheese Burger, but then you've got a Cuban burger, a Spanish (Iberico) burger, an Italian burger, Asian, African, duck, and chicken!  Check out the Egyptian: beef with dried figs, goat cheese and thyme honey au gratin. What?! That sounds amazing.  A great array of flavors here.  You could come here all the time and not get bored.


The Egyptian.  This one was ordered medium. Cooked correctly.

First of all, the onions that came with my burger weren't regular uncooked onions.  They were fried onions.   That's fine, but you've got to be specific on your menu!  I looked at my burger, which consisted of mere pieces of duck, then looked at the pile of toppings and decided to dump them all on top of the burger.  Then I tasted the plum sauce.  Wham.  Loads of flavor here, and pieces of plum mixed in as well.  The sauce was sweet, but not tangy or anything else, but this sugary explosion didn't need a built in counterpoint to balance it out.  The duck and onions would do that.  So instead of using it as a 'dipping sauce' I slathered it on the bun.   The bun, by the way, wasn't Sourdough.  There was a bad translation though, and that was definitely disappointing.  The flavor of Sourdough would have been excellent on this kind of burger.  But, the end result was pretty good.  The plum sauce was sweet and mixed with the salty flavors of duck and onion, the burger was quite tasty.  Unfortunately, the hoisin yoghurt was totally overpowered. When tried on its own it didn't do much anyways and just kind of tasted like yoghurt.  What was nice was that the duck had the skin and fat on it. It was cut into strips and laid on the bun.  It kind of paled in comparison to my girlfriend's beef burger, but with everything piled on, it was pretty substantial.


Skimpy duck pieces on my Daffy Duck.

This, unfortunately, doesn't really count as a burger. It wasn't even a patty of any kind. I expected the duck to be ground quickly post cooking into a patty, or to have it at least be a full piece of duck, or even to have a big pile of duck to make an impressive sandwich, but the slim amount of duck, combined with its overall lack of burger-ness was a bit disappointing.  The duck was also overcooked.  Sure the skin was fried and crispy, but the meat itself was cooked to medium/medium-well, and when you're serving duck breast, you DEFINITELY want it to be medium rare.  It's far juicier, and the meat isn't all tough and unsatisfying.  So all in all my burger was a bit unsatisfying.  Sure I was full afterwards, but there was a wow-factor in this burger that I was expecting because of the ingredients.  Not like my girlfriend's burger.  Which looked and tasted awesome.


I'd totally come back for this.

The fries also left something to be desired.  Uniformly cooked, and seasoned with a bit of salt, the flavor, even with ketchup, didn't stand up to the strong sweet and salty flavors. They were a bit thickly cut too.  They weren't quite the size of steak fries, but bigger than a normal medium cut.  On a side note, the more I eat burgers and fries, the more I feel like chefs add on the fries as an afterthought with no concern to how the flavors pair with the burgers they're being served alongside.  The cole slaw as an additional side was nice.  It was tangy, a little bit sour, and the carrots and cabbage in it were crisp.  It was actually some damn good cole slaw.

So what would bring me back to Zsa Zsa?  Besides the Egyptian?  All the other beef burger options.  And the add-ons.  Basically any ingredient on any of their burgers, plus a few others, are all options you can add to the burger you're eating, which basically gives you a massive number of burger creations for your eating pleasure.  And if they cook the burger as well as they did in the above picture, I would definitely make the trek out here to try this again.  I just wouldn't get the duck burger again.




Cooked Correctly:  2.5/5
Design/Ingredients:  1.5/4
Plating:  2/3
Value:  1/3 (not enough duck meat)