If you’re running a burger restaurant, you have certain aspects at your disposal to advertise yourself and build your brand. If you remember back in the golden age, McDonald’s had an entire roster of mascots including Grimace, the hamburglar and, of course, Ronald McDonald. These characters tried to convey the experience you would have if you visited a McDonald’s, they didn’t really try to sell the food’s taste, and CERTAINLY, they didn’t tell you that for your fun and games cows were slaughtered and their corpses were turned into handy patties. No, they did not. But this establishment does, kind of. “Rinderwahn” is the German word for mad cow disease and their entire branding is based on cows. For me, knowing how the sausage is made and perfectly willing to hunt for food if necessary, this is not a huge deal, but if you’re looking for a place to take your vegetarian girlfriend while you can still enjoy a huge hunk of meat, maybe keep looking.

Rinderwahn

• Restaurant: Rinderwahn
• Address: Weihburggasse 3, A-1010 Vienna
• Date: 2019-03-03

The experience starts with making your reservation and looking up the menu online, I’m a firm believer of that. Rinderwahn’s website is an absolute treat, aesthetically well made, responsive, there’s online reservation, and you can order via foodora. By far the best website yet, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t find something to complain about. The URLs don’t hide the HTML file extensions, so no perfect website score for you!

Score: 66.69

For an explanation on how the score is calculated, click here

Not too great. In the end, the alrightish burgers couldn’t make up for the lousy service and selection of items.

Burger Bread Score: 5.00

Most of us thought the buns were okay, giving a rating of 5 or 6. I personally concluded they were better than most at keeping their integrity under the constant strain of the moist vegetables they were containing. Michi disagrees, saying they were way too soft, awarding them only 3 points.

Burger Sauce Score: 5.33

Did you know: you’re most likely to be successful in online dating if people are divided over your appearance, meaning that 50% think you’re pretty and 50% think you’re ugly. I heard that on a TED talk, so it must be true. Why am I mentioning this? Well, if you read the explanation of our rating system, you know that the final scores are averages from all critics. Since we don’t include any measures of dispersion, like standard deviation, you don’t know if we voted unanimously or had internal disagreements.

I am mentioning this now because it’s the first time in the long-running burger critics series of 3 installments that there were non-unsignificant dispersions. The sauce scores above 5, but two of us gave it a 4. This means a lot if you only have 6 people voting.

Burger Meat Score: 6.17

I thought the patties were stunning in taste, perhaps the best ones so far. Ali didn’t think so, but it is entirely possible the bad service got to his taste buds and corrupted the eternal sunshine of his spotless mind, more on that later.

Selection of Side Dishes Score: 6.33

They had

• French Fries
• Cajun Orion Rings
• Chopped Salad
• Cole Slaw
• Sweet Potato Fries
• Rocket Salad

Taste of Side Dishes Score: 6.33

Naturally, none of us ordered any of the salads, but the fries and onion rings were edible. Unlike we saw in previous restaurants where the onion rings would mostly have a lot of ring but very little onion, here, also get some with lots of onion but little ring. Pick your poison, I guess.

Selection of Drinks Score: 4.33

They had three homemade drinks:

• Ice Tea
• Lemon Lemonade (duh)
• Cranberry Lemonade

You can do better than that.

Selection of Sauces: 4.67

Bare minimum like mayo, mustard, and BBQ, but the sneaky bastards include pickles and pico de gallo in the same list to make it look bigger, you can’t fool us with your menu equivalent of a push-up bra!

Payment Options Score: 5.83

Again, mostly bare minimum, no bitcoin, I believe no Amex and Diner’s Club? What if we came to dine in your club by train (the train is the American Express, that’s the joke)?

Price Score: 4.00

Why are you more expensive than most burger restaurants when you’re not better than most burger restaurants?

Service Score: 4.50

The waiter was doing his job fine but sometimes seemed like he wanted to be somewhere else. I feel you, buddy, I would much rather live in the Pokemon world too, but life ain’t just sunshine and rainbows.

Waiting Time Score: 4.00

We went on a Sunday, and you could tell. Two of us were late, and we ordered without them, but they ended up arriving just 5 minutes after our order. Despite the small time difference, they got their food 20 minutes after we got ours. When they saw their burgers, I was already done with mine. If you arrive later, you eat later, what bothers me is the inconsistency.

Selection of Desserts Score: 2.50

Cheesecake and milkshake, that’s it. To be fair, you can choose what you want them to put in your milkshake, but what if I want to actually chew my dessert and don’t like cheesecake?

Taste of Desserts Score: 6.67

The milkshake was good, I’ll give them that. Apparently, the cheesecake was good as well, but since I don’t like cheesecakes, I can’t really judge.

Atmosphere Score: 3.50

If you took your average steakhouse and combined it with your average food truck, you’d get this. There were these weird plastic compartments separating some tables, almost like in a diner but without the cool American midwest vibes.

Conclusion

The burgers were actually not bad, it’s a shame everything else couldn’t keep up. Try to avoid all of those things by just ordering the food and trying it for yoursef.

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