21 Anderson St, Yarraville. Phone: 9689 3099

THIS RESTAURANT HAS CLOSED DOWN.

Heading for a Geelong night subediting shift without packing a meal of some sort is something of a disaster.

This is especially so on Sunday nights, when the handful of Asian eateries that turn out acceptable and acceptably affordable meals the rest of the week, lunch and dinner, are closed. Shut. Tumbleweeds down the main drag.

Thus it was that recently, without home-packed food of my own, I resorted to the easy, lazy option of hitting the McDonald’s outlet right across the road from the offices of the Geelong Advertiser.

Eating McDonalds is something I do maybe every couple of years or so – just long enough, it seems, to have forgotten how awful it was the last time.

I had one of their much-advertised Angus burgers.

Little bit fancy? Ha! How about a real big load of … unfood stuffed in an unbun.

Horrible chips, barely lukewarm. I’m tempted to say they were tasteless, but in fact they did have a taste – a bad one.

Blah soft drink.

Just terrible!

Why do folks put up with such crap? Or, more to the point, why do so many of them positively revere it?

One of life’s mysteries.

We dig our burgers and know there’s ways of going about it with much better results than delivered by the McDonalds option.

Or Hungry Jacks, which I find preferrable, though we’re talking very small degrees there.

We love Grill’d, as experienced during Bennie’s 10th birthday shebang.

For a contrast in taste and style, we also like our local old-school burger place.

As well, we’ve been somewhat regular visitors to one of the breed of burger places that has been resident in Anderson St, Yarraville, for a few years now.

According to the Burger Edge website, there are a dozen or so outlets in Melbourne, three others elsewhere in the country and four more in the planning stages.

This sounds pretty good to me – if franchising must be part of our food culture, the smaller the better I reckon.

So it is that I rock up on a chilly mid-week night to see how our Burger Edge scrubs up these days.

There’s nothing flash about the place – utilitarian but perfectly fine.

Best of all, though, the Anderson St shop has a tidy upstairs dining space – cosy on a cold night!

I order a the BBQ Bacon Burger, going combo-style with chips and a can of Pepsi for $4 and 70 cents more for a small tub of “aioli” for a meal-total of $14.60.

The chips are better than good but short of great. There’s plenty of them as part of my combo deal and they’re good and crunchy, but they could be a tad hotter.

The peach-coloured tub of dressing is fine for chip-dipping but calling it “aioli” is a stretch.

The burger, likewise, is better than good but short of great. The bacon adds flavour, but I discern little or no BBQ sauce tang. The salad bits – lettuce, red onion, tomato – are fine, but the beef patty simply isn’t, well, as “beefy” as those found at Grill’d.

In fact, where Grill’d scores 8 or even 9 with us when we visit, Burger Edge is more your 6 0r 7.

Not a fail by any means – I enjoyed my meal – but just lacking, well, an edge that would make a difference.

Burger Edge has a loyalty program that is different.

Instead of having to purchase X number of burgers to qualify for a freebie, they present customers with a plastic card that once ratified on the company website delivers a 10 per cent discount on every meal.

The Burger Edge website is here.