britishers -- tell me about WIMPY BARS and their shitty burgers

I ate at Five Guys today for the first time. Burger and fillings were swell. Bun held together okay but was a little bit sweet and weird. Received an abundance of spicy chips which were saturated in salt and just not that great. Didn't mind the burger though.

five guys was no better than burger king when i went, and very expensive.

yeah, five guys is insanely expensive for what it is

not to go too far down the burger route but i like shake shack a lot. five guys not so much.

Yeah I paid about £13 for a burger, fries and a drink. You got a choice of free fillings but definitely nothing special.

If anyone visits Bristol, I can't recommend Oowee Diner (a tiny little burger place in Montpelier area) highly enough. I paid less than I did at Five Guys and the burger was INSANELY good. Worth a pilgrimage.

my main takeaway from living away from the uk and coming back to visit is that there are hundreds of expensive burger places everywhere now

we've the same in Aus too. which is criminal because the original chip shop burger is to die for, but there's all these places like new york minute, burger edge, grill'd and such where you end up paying $18 for a burg and chips and that's just not on. oh and don't start me on "royal stacks" near my work who get queues out the door at lunch for burgers with sides of fucking frozen potato gems drenched in cheese goo which is somehow retro and trendy.

fillings

toppings

(hoping this is yet another divisive uk/us usage quirk)

Thick, dry brioche buns seem to be a plague in London at the moment.

bad burgers are an eternal plague.

stupidly expensive burgers a slightly newer one. thanks hipsters

same in Paris now, expensive burgers on brioche are everywhere. I saw one recently for 22€ ! yeah it had foie gras but c'mon. at one such place though, Le camion qui fume, a food truck that also has a resto now, I had the best burger of my life (was 10€ I think?), so it's not all bad.

Drifting further off topic, Manhattan Burger in Berlin does burger, chips and cola for about €7 and is stunning. It shouldn't really be as hard as everyone seems intent on making it look.

love foie gras way too much to ruin it by wrapping a burger around it

yeah that sounds wrong.

had a burger with peanut butter in the other week. sounded interesting on paper, but in reality the pb muted the beefiness of the pattie

bump for Wimpy content.

http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/grace-dent-on-the-highs-and-lows-of-having-the-best-job-in-london-a3552256.html

That one in Southsea/Portsmouth is still there, saw it yesterday.

We need photos, Mark

Ah, not going back until Amber's at uni.

There's still a Wimpy on Lewisham High Street which unlike the McDonald's over the road is curiously un-immortalised in grime.

I used to go to the one on Lewisham High Street. Just a couple of times until I realised that actually I didn't like any of their food.

wimpy's twitter is like a glimpse into an alternate universe

https://mobile.twitter.com/WimpyUK/status/868118503311716362/photo/1

I love the photos of their awards. How many things are wrong with every single picture. It's this kind of acceptance of mediocrity that makes me think perhaps the UK is the place for me after all.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_kx7aIXUAAATKv.jpg

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19224841_1463387303715573_2014595867061447693_n.jpg?oh=de593ce610855cf5ffba285094ebca8e&oe=59E4EBA3

'the world wide symbol of eating pleasure'

'french fried potatoes' is cracking me up

So are these what Peter Gabriel was singing about in "Dancing With the Moonlit Knight"?: "Chewing through your Wimpy dreams/They eat without a sound/
Digesting England by the pound"

the connective tissue between wimpy and prog rock has been disappointingly underexplored thus far, it's true

BENDER the meaty frankfurter

King Wimpson

I'm sure Bob Stanley has posted pictures of the Amersham branch in the last six months or so.

I think the Genesis line is a pun on the hamburger and also the Wimpy housing company that I guess Gabriel saw "digesting England by the pound" as they blanketed England with lots of identikit suburban housing.

what year is that menu from?

sneak preview of the 2018 lineup iirc

xp it has halfpenny on it so pre-1971

No, we had halfpennies post-decimalisation, they went out of circulation around 1984. That'd be in shillings and that if it was pre-1971.

ah

i never knew!

internet says it's 1972

I did not know (although it was mentioned on this thread ten years ago) that there was a Wimpy computer game for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. The box looked like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/Mr._Wimpy_Coverart.png

However, the original cover art as designed by Bob Wakelin* for Ocean Software and rejected by Wimpy, was... this (click through):
https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/File:Mr._Wimpy_(Original_Artwork).jpg

The game was apparently not very good, in case you hadn't guessed.

* if you played any games on 8-bit micros or the Amiga circa '84-92 you've probably seen Wakelin's art before: https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Bob_Wakelin plus many others

It was a version of Burger Time iirc, i think I liked it

more information than you probably need here:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003312

(it's kind of hilarious how those tiny thumbnails on the side there are actual 1:1 spectrum screenshots, 256x192px)

I can remember the Spectrum/C64 rivalry being quite sectarian at times, and almost spilling into real hate and violence at my local community centre computer club!

the connective tissue between wimpy and prog rock has been disappointingly underexplored thus far, it's true

They come up in Jethro Tull's "Up to Me" too.

xp yeah but Speccy owners were right :D

don't get me showing unflattering images of the much better graphics and colour qualities of the C64 version of Uridium, next to the Spectrum version!

That link to Bob Wakelin's art, annotated, is brilliant
Just wasted too much time on WOS, shame a lot of links have gone

Made it. Sitting in not my local Wimpy but the Eltham one