Croydon’s answer to Morgan Spurlock, KEN TOWL, last week set off to discover where the best burgers are to be found in the town. His harrowing account is a testimony to fortitude and a strong stomach

Last month, Inside Croydon reported the redesign of Croydon’s George Street branch of McDonald’s, quoting franchisee Ian Stevenson’s boast that the changes would “create a more seamless and enjoyable experience for the customer”.

New look, much like the old look: McDonald’s, George Street

If there is anything that I like as a customer, it is a seamless and enjoyable experience.

I decided that I wanted to see exactly how “the redesign of McDonald’s kitchens and dining areas as part of the Convenience of the Future [would] better integrate digital sales channels, the McDonalds App and make smarter use of internal space to enhance the dine-in experience”.

But why limit my dine-in experience to just one burger outlet?

In Croydon, there are many purveyers of patties. Thus, I conceived the idea of making a week-long burgerthon, Morgan Spurlock-like, pitting one burger against the next, evaluating them all in terms of cost, speed and taste, a sort of “Five Burgers, One Guy” quest in search of seamless dine-in joy from Monday to Friday, with five-star ratings on each of three key categories: price, speed of service (this is supposed to be fast food, after all) and taste.

MONDAY: WHELANS

Smashing it: the Whelans burger, costing nearly £15 most nights, but only £10.50 on Mondays

Monday night is burger night at Whelans, the Irish pub in South Croydon (13-15 Selsdon Road).

Whelans sells Smashburgers, which I am told is the latest trend in the burger trade. The burgers are so called because they are “smashed” down on to the grill, creating a flatter burger with more surface area, and, so the theory goes, more char-grilled flavour.

I had to go on Monday, to keep the price of the burger down. On Mondays, the top-of-the-range “Am I blue” (“toasted bun, house sauce, shredded lettuce, juicy beef, blue cheese, bacon and caramelised onions”) will set you back a mere £10.50, instead of the Tuesday to Sunday £14.50, and you get plenty of skin-on fries with it.

And it comes on a plate, with cutlery.

Pardon me: are Whelans’ padron peppers a bit of an apology dish?

In this test of Croydon’s fast food, it’s not super-fast. I ordered at 7.05pm and was served at 7.15pm. But 10 minutes seems reasonable to me. Reassuring even.

The burger was indeed juicy and had a perfect texture. The caramelised onions and blue cheese made it even more enjoyable and the bacon was a generous slab.

Next time I go, I might try some of the extensive list of reasonably priced tapas dishes, though I’ll probably avoid the apologetic-sounding “pardon peppers”. Do they present a serious risk of belching?

Price: *** (on a Monday, ** the rest of the week).
Speed: ***
Taste: ***** (the “smash” thing works!)

TUESDAY: McDONALD’S

A ‘more seamless and enjoyable experience’: McDonald’s on George Street

At 6.36pm on Tuesday evening, I entered an overlit and rather shabby industrial-chic McDonald’s. By 6.38pm, I had managed to order “A quarter-pound patty of 100% beef, with two slices of cheese, onions, pickles, mustard and a dollop of tomato ketchup in a sesame seed bun,” with fries and a Coke. All done from a machine on the wall.

The machine in this new, semi-automated, “more seamless and enjoyable experience” asked me if I wanted to “go large”.

I said, “Yes”, because it was only about 30p more and Morgan Spurlock had always gone large.

Disappointingly, the machine told me that it had failed to print me a receipt, but helpfully flashed up the No20 for a millisecond, so I was able to convince the guy at the counter that I had really paid my £6.89, and he asked me if I would like a receipt, because, I suppose, I look like the kind of guy who would like a receipt. Not a great problem. Hardly “seamless”.

At 6.40, he said “Twenty!” and gave me a brown paper bag and a small bucket of Coca-Cola.

McDonald’s had claimed that the new setup would provide “a more efficient way to order and will leave customers with more space to enjoy their meal”. As for the former, I am not sure that a machine that fails to provide a receipt is terribly efficient, and as for the latter…  I looked around for space to enjoy my meal. There was a small shelf at the side, with a vacant space next to the bin and a redundant “caution wet floor” sign.

Fast food, brought to you by AI: computer says ‘No’

So I took it and started to eat.

I am not sure I was able to enjoy it, despite the pocket money pricing. I liked the mouthful of gherkin and the first bite of slippery, salty burger, but the mandatory ketchup made it much too sweet and the bun seemed to be made of whipped nothing.

I ate, standing, while the guy next to me tried on a pair of trainers and his mates admired them, and another guy stood by, waiting for me to vacate my prime spot by the waste bin.

Luckily for me, a Big Mac these days isn’t that big, and I managed to get out of there soon enough carrying my bucket of Coke up George Street with a weight of goo in my stomach but little sense of satisfaction and no joy in my heart at all.

Price: ***
Speed: **** (4min from entering to eating, but the machine was a bit of a faff – what’s wrong with a human being?)
Taste: **

WEDNESDAY: WENDY’S

A square meal: Wendy’s, on the junction of George Street and Wellesley Road

The next day was Wendy’s day, so I headed for 19-20 Wellesley Road, just a short way from the source of my previous evening’s meal.

Before I got there, I looked up some information about the company. The website tells us that the chain is named after the founders’ daughter, but the burgers are named after the founder himself.

“When he was eight years old, Dave Thomas dreamed he’d run the best restaurant in the world… He believed in a place where you get great food, made fresh, served by nice people.”

I guessed that great food, made fresh, by nice people, would take more than four minutes to prepare.

I entered the Croydon branch of Wendy’s on the corner of Wellesley and George, at 6.46pm, got my order, “Dave’s Double Combo”, taken by one nice person at 6.49pm and at 6.52pm I was handed a foil-wrapped parcel by another.

I liked the look of the foil wrapping. Red on silver, it looked like a gigantic Tunnocks teacake. I opened it up to reveal something substantially bigger than a Big Mac. Skin on fries, too, and a can of Sprite. Wendy’s isn’t “the best restaurant in the world”, but at £8.99 for the lot, it provided decent enough value. A square deal, you might say.

Price: ***
Speed: ***
Taste: **** (Square burgers really do seem to taste better!)

THURSDAY: FIVE GUYS

Five days, one guy: Thursday saw Ken Towl visiting a deserted Five Guys on Croydon High Street

Thursday, and I discovered (Thanks, Wikipedia!) that there really are five guys, five guys named Murrell, the brothers own the business. Apparently, “Matt and Jim travel the United States visiting stores, Chad oversees training, Ben selects the franchisees, and Tyler runs the bakery.”

The Croydon Five Guys is at 7-11 High Street. I entered and got directed to my right by a very large security guard. He just waved his hand, didn’t say a word, hardly the friendliest of welcomes. But I wasn’t here to enjoy myself – this was work. So I turned to my right and walked up to the counter.

It was a bit of a shock. Despite the fact that most of the components of my meal, the “toppings”, were free (I asked for lettuce, tomato, onion, mustard, mayo, pickle, mushroom, jalapeño, and relish) my meal of cheeseburger (£11.15), medium fries (£5.75) and a large paper cup of cherry Dr Pepper (£4.35), came to a whopping £21.25.

I forgot to record how long it took. I was too busy working out how to get to the end of the month without taking a loan.

A family of five walked in, saw the prices and walked out. This is not a family restaurant.

A bit of a shock: the Five Guys cheeseburger

I think it took a little longer than Wendy’s but, there again, it was a bespoke burger. My number was shouted out and I collected a large paper bag from which I extracted a very highly stacked double cheeseburger and a cup of fries.

There were lots more fries in the bottom of the bag, a thing they do, according to Wikipedia and other sources, to give the impression of generosity. They can afford to be generous.

Much of what Five Guys does would seem to be about appearances. The restaurant is a temple to style over substance. Wikipedia points out that “Bags of potatoes are sometimes stacked in customer spaces…for aesthetic reasons.”

Potatoes in red and white sacks as design feature. In Croydon, these sit alongside red and white boxes of peanut oil. Croydon always takes aesthetics to another level.

It turns out that all the burgers are doubles, except for the cheaper range of “little” burgers. I had assumed these were for children and, anyway, in the spirit of Spurlock, I wasn’t going to be asking for a little burger.

It wasn’t a bad burger, and you do get free shell-on peanuts to nibble at while you wait, and the Dr Pepper was, theoretically, bottomless, since you had to pour it from the machine yourself. But it was the most expensive meal I have ever eaten without cutlery.

The place was deserted apart from a couple who came in, invested their savings in burgers and spent 20 minutes eating and doomscrolling, and five guys at the next table who appeared to be sharing one bottomless drink. I left and walked to the tram with the heaviest weight yet in my guts and a resolve to find somewhere more affordable for Friday.

Price: *
Speed: ***
Taste: *** (I managed to avoid ketchup)

FRIDAY: SMACKS HAMBURGERS

‘Most viral burger’: Smacks, on South End

Self-proclaimed the “most viral burger brand since 2021” (a tad niche, perhaps? What were the more viral burger brands before 2021?), with eight branches in Britain and one in the UAE, 21 “stores in the pipeline” and a target of 100 branches, Croydon’s Smack Burger is at 31 South End. It is open until 1am, so not the only halal takeway touting for trade from the after-the-pub crowd.

I arrived at 7.20pm to find a garish pink palace. On entering, I felt like Ken in Barbie World. I had been planning, for the purposes of consistency, to order the double cheeseburger meal, but on a whim, out of desperation caused by the monotony of my diet, I ordered a brisket burger (“eight-hour slow-smoked Prime Angus Brisket, 1x 2oz freshly ground Angus beef patty, BBQ sauce, sweet chilli jam, mustard and crispy onion in our Premium bun” according to the website), and waited.

And waited.

Deliveroo drivers came and went. At 7.32, I was called to the counter with a cry of “Brisket!” and handed my paper bag and paper cup of Fanta.

Barbie World: it’s all a little pink in Smacks

Back at my table I took out the flimsy bag of fries that looked like an anaemic version of the ones I had had in McDonald’s three days earlier. There was mayonnaise that tasted like salad cream with ideas above its station.

The burger was interesting. It was drenched in smokey, syrupy barbecue sauce, the shouty freshly ground patty hidden under generous slabs of brisket.

The burger had a good texture but I have no idea what it tasted like. Or rather, it tasted like smokey, syrupy barbecue sauce. To be fair, there was a lot of brisket. I don’t know what it tasted like. The bread could not hold together under the onslaught of the syrup and it disintegrated as I tried to eat.

Brown smokey syrup: loads of brisket, but only one flavour

I was a mess. I went to the counter to ask for more napkins and a knife and fork. I got napkins and a plastic fork that ripped up the paper under the surprisingly tough eight-hour slow cooked brisket that just would not break down into politely edible pieces.

I left and walked up South End carrying my branded Smacks cup of Fanta, trying to convince myself that I looked like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction but knowing, deep down, that I looked like a pathetic man-baby sucking on a plastic straw from a paper cup.

Price: ***
Speed: **
Taste: * (unless you really like brown smokey syrup)

Conclusion

I was surprised to find that even with a Guinness (I went large with a pint for an additional £5.50), Monday’s meal in Whelans was cheaper than the one in Five Guys. And in the pub, the burger was brought out to me on a plate and I was asked if I had enjoyed it when I finished.

Back on Monday, I took cutlery and customer service for granted. Of the orthodox burger joints, Wendy’s felt like the best value; the burger itself was good and the staff were friendliest. All burger joint bread is vile, seamlessly so, and has the most tenuous claim to be fit for human consumption. The burgers themselves, though, in moderation, can be quite enjoyable.

However, after a week of eating dangerously, I feel moribund, morally bankrupt and infantilised beyond my wildest nightmares. I crave cutlery and plates, and mayonnaise that does not contain xanthan gum or potassium sorbate.

Actually, I think I just fancy a salad.

• As well as eating the town’s burger offer so that you don’t have to, Ken Towl has been writing on Croydon and culture, with reviews and reports for more than a decade. Click here for a full archive of his work

Read more: Mystery as Fuller’s exit three Croydon pubs in unseemly hurry
Read more: Town centre traders struggle on to serve up the good times
Read more: Poundshop politician who puts the ‘sham’ into shambolic
Read more: Talawa’s plays in search of an audience: the acts deserve better

Inside Croydon – If you want real journalism, delivering real news, from a publication that is actually based in the borough, please consider paying for it. Sign up today: click here for more details

• If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com

• As featured on Google News Showcase

• We offer FREE ads to community groups when they have members who are paid subscribers to Inside Croydon

• Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here

• Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network

• Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London

• ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine