Welcome to the Circus!

Burger Circus is located at 22 Hollywood Rd.

If you’re a Central dweller or LKF crawler, you’re sure to have already walked past – and peeked into – Burger Circus.
Isn’t it cute?!?! In the style of a classic American diner, Burger Circus serves exactly what you’d expect: burgers, milkshakes and fries.
There’s fun details everywhere, from the menu holders to the staff’s old-school aprons and hats. Guests can choose between booth seating, or a spot at the bar.
My friend and I ended up at the bar, and started with two shakes while waiting for our burgers.

The service is friendly and quick, so we didn’t wait for long. But long enough to both agree that the shakes were really good. There’s also some alcoholic milkshakes on the menu, but I’ll have to try that next time…

Topped with whipped cream and maraschino cherries, they were scrumptious and creamy 🙂
The burgers, as you can see, are served in little paper boxes. I would advise to eat the burger using the box as a holder, because they are dripping with fabulous grease. Also, the bread is very fluffy and the whole thing is huge and quite difficult to eat by biting into it (without displacing your jaw, I mean).Of course, to get the right photos, I took mine out of the box. Conclusion? –> Burger Circus is probably not the best place for a first date, unless you’re prepared to get really messy and have bits of food dangling out of your mouth 😀

The menu has quite a few options, including chicken, and tuna burgers. I went for the Whole Show burger: beef patty, fried egg, cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickled beetroot and spicy mayonnaise.

It took a few bites to get into the spicy mayo in the middle, but boy was it worth the wait! A great combination in my opinion and, as a huge fan of beetroot, it was refreshing to see the underrated veggie make an appearance.

Overall the burger was really satisfying and hit the spot. Definitely a fan of the generous amounts of melted cheese oozing out of the bun. YUM.

Compared to a burger (similar price) I tried at Wan Chai’s Butcher Club a couple months ago, I felt like this one was better. And the awesome décor is just the cherry on the top!On the other hand, while the sauce on the Circus Fries was very tasty (onion, cheese, and “circus sauce” reminiscent of “animal style” sauce from In-N-Out), I thought the fries weren’t thin or crispy enough to really blow us away.

After dinner, someone told me I should have tried the onion rings, which are great apparently – so now I’m living in regret.
The whole experience was fun and fast – just like a simple burger joint should be. The convenience of the location, the irresistible design and feel-good burgers will have me back. Oh yeah, and it’s open till midnight EVERY DAY.

Bakker x

p.s. UPDATE (19/02/15) remember my post on the HK Beer Company? Well, Burger Circus stocks 4 of their drafts – so if you’re in Central and want to kill two birds with one stone, check them out! 🙂

Fun Food Apps for iPhone

Hi guys! Tonight’s post was actually supposed to be a new review. However, my camera has some issues transferring the photos, so in the meantime please enjoy some of my picks for fun food apps for the iPhone.

These three picks are apps I’ve had on my iPhone for several years now, and never cease to be a source of occasional, mind-numbing fun 😉

Scoops is extremely simple. And that’s why it’s fun. After choosing a theme (my favourite is the hamburger theme), the objective is to build as large a stack of ingredients as possible without losing a life.

The ingredients fall down in a random order from any corner of the top of the screen, and all you have to do is tilt your burger/screen to “catch” them. The higher your burger gets, the more wobbly – and the more points you get, the faster the ingredients fly down at you.

If you get really good, you’ll eventually stack up all the way into the space, filled with stars and planets… 😀

Oven Break is a bit more complicated, but only by a little. Your character is a gingerbread man who is running across the screen to escape from the kitchen. Using the “jump” and “slide” buttons, you have to navigate the oncoming stream of goodies (which get you points) and deadly obstacles (which make you lose a life).

Then, there’s King’s Cup – the classic deck of cards drinking game, made digitally convenient. I’ve played this with friends on a night out before, and it’s always been a success. If you’re unfamiliar with the rules of this game click: here.

There’s built-in instructions in case you’re feeling rusty, and like all of the apps I’ve showed you so far, it’s a free app!

Last but certainly not least, is any Hong Kong foodie’s essential app: the OpenRice app. OpenRice is an online dining guide edited by everyday people, for the people. It’s awesome, and having an on-the-go version that’s easier than loading onto your smartphone browser is priceless.

Yup, you guessed it, this one’s free too… It’s especially useful when you’re not sure what to eat in the area, as it syncs with your phone’s GPS to recommend local eateries.

Please stay tuned for the upcoming resto review, and hope you enjoyed this edition of “BYTES“. To read more BYTES posts, here are some links to previous blogs of mine:

“Secrets of Food Photography”
&
“Why Order @ Felix?”

Secrets of Food Photography

Hi readers!

I recently had to the opportunity to work with Tasting Kitchen Magazine, and conduct four chef interviews across Hong Kong’s fine dining scene for this Perfect Pairings feature.

In the article, the chefs talked through their culinary interpretations to the brief: pairing a classic seafood seafood dish from their restaurant with this year’s Sauvignon Blanc from Cloudy Bay (a New Zealand producer).

As always, each project I take on brings its own eye-opening revelations, and this one was no different. This time, I had the pleasure of observing and learning from a successful photographer, whose portfolio includes fashion, architecture – and food – who was on the job with me.

After four days of hanging out, I convinced him to give me an interview where he (who prefers to go incognito, like a spy!) shared some of the secrets of food photography he has gathered over a long career as a professional photographer.What are some of the challenges in shooting food versus people, or buildings?
Food has this whole element of making it look appetising. There’s a science to that, really. There are a lot of things that you have to take into consideration because food has many textures; it could be saucy, it could be dry, reflective, or have oil on it.

So, lighting is very crucial. Plus food – especially hot food – if it sits for a while it starts to wilt. There’s techniques of not cooking food to the fullest to make sure the colors are still there, or to not cook it at all, even. Also, treating food with chemicals so that you have a longer period to photograph the food.

Without treating it or planning ahead, you have about a five minute window to shoot it. In photography that’s really short.

What are the wackiest techniques you’ve seen applied to food?I’ve seen everything, from hair spray to glue; anything that kind of sets it in place for a little bit longer. That stuff is not out of the ordinary, actually, it’s just a trade secret in food photography.

Which is the most difficult cuisine to shoot?
Chinese food. A lot of it is wok-fried and saucy. And flat. It doesn’t have height. Photography-wise, when a plate comes out saucy and flat, you can’t light it to look dimensional. Western pastas are pretty bad too.

Easy stuff to photograph would be… sushi. Sushi looks like art, it’s colourful and its got a shape to it, so you can light it.

Being in Hong Kong, however, there are a lot of chefs who take care to present Chinese food in an artistic manner. Those are usually OK to shoot.

But, if you are stuck with a flat dish, what can you do to counter that?
You use distractions to distract from the main visual. If the plate is somewhat non-photographable, then you start to throw in elements for lighting, angles, backdrops and texture to present it as a dining experience. Like a wine, or utensils. If it’s really bad then you can use shadows and textures behind to make it visually decent and just layer.

Tell us an anecdote from your days as a food photographer…
My first and probably last experience of a working for a major franchise campaign… It was for a burger franchise and it was so monotonous. Basically we had to cook three to four hundred burger patties in a span of four days trying to get the right ‘look’ which is this consistency where it’s not too grey or dull. It has to be juicy enough and cooked to their presentation standard.

They shipped us a truckload of patties, literally, and the assistant in the back was cooking patties non-stop. In the end we had to bring in an actual employee to cook it and moved the shoot to a franchise location instead of a studio.

The second problem was finding really green lettuce and fresh tomatoes. The lettuce had to have the right waviness to hold up the bun a little bit – and the tomatoes had to be an exact width… it was crazy.

With these kinds of shoots, you’ll always see the water droplets on the lettuce right? Those are actually tiny drops of glue.

Wow…
Yeah, it was an educational shoot. I probably learned everything from that one shoot. I got that job earlier on in my career when I thought, ‘Oh yeah, food photography can’t be that difficult”.

———-

And how wrong that proved to be! 🙂

Thanks for reading, and keep coming back for more bites…

Bakker x

Cali Dreamin’

An overdue HELLO is in order!!  I’m back in Hong Kong after a month-long odyssey of food and fun in California.  Get ready for lots of photos…

Next comes the famous Californian burger drive-thru joint: In-N-Out Burger.  All of my Cali friends have raved about this place and it definitely lived up to expectations.

Luckily I have local friends who advised me to order my burger and fries “Animal Style” (refers to special sauce) from their secret menu.  There were pamphlets with calorie details available… but I thought it best to stick to an “ignorance is bliss” philosophy.

Being the melting pot that America is, trying American Mexican and American Chinese food was a must!  The Mexican (which I call “Mexy” for short) is scarily addictive… I’m going to miss it since I have yet to find decent US-style Mexican food in Hong Kong.

The most popular Chinese food chain in California is “Panda Express”.  According to my Californian native guide and friend, they have pretty much secured a monopoly on Asian food through their contracts with malls in which other Asian eateries are barred from setting up shop near by.

Like most food imported into the United States by immigrants, Chinese food in California has taken a life of its own.  Adapting to American taste-buds, it hardly resembles the Hong Kong Chinese food on which it is based.

I am a HUGE fan of pancakes, bacon, egg-type breakfast dishes.  Luckily I can get my fix in Hong Kong at the Flying Pan.  In the States, however, there are many diners either established in the 1950s, or recreated today, with beautiful steel and leather seating in the classic retro design.

I felt like I was in a Grease movie, which is a bit ironic considering the amount of grease I was probably consuming.  I don’t think I’ll get over… the American Diner.

That’s it for now… hope you enjoyed the eye-candy!  Next post will come to you from Hong Kong, a.k.a. = home.

Bakker x