Five Guys, Shepherds Bush

…don’t do it… you’re better than this…

2/10

I’m not very good at answering things. Phones, texts, emails, letters – you name it, at one point or another they’ve each been ignored. The door is a big one too, anyone knocks and my hand reaches for the remote, thumbing the down key on the volume button and willing the intruder-of-my-peace to impose themselves on someone else. Nothing to see here officer.

One night, quite soon after I get home but before anyone else has, there is a knock at the door. As usual it goes unanswered, but a few minutes pass and then there is a second knock… Hmm. Have I forgotten that I’ve ordered something…..no…. have I missed someone’s call…. Nope, no flickering light on my phone, so no. Heading to bed and I just can’t shake the creeping unease, so slip on my trackies and go next door. My street is pretty friendly and my neighbours are the kind of people who notice things – when I have house guests, whether those guests are family or friends, the changing of housemates and all the rest. They’re observant, and I actually quite like it – little guardians if you will. So I knock on their door and the man, a big one with a shaved head but gentle as a teddy, answers. No, they didn’t knocked on my door just now, and nobody has knocked on theirs so it isn’t a door-to-door thing. The nail in the coffin of my fading tranquility is when the wife asks, eyes kind and bent towards me, ‘do you feel safe Mehreen?’.

Well, I did, but now I feel edgy and hyper aware. People are lovely but as soon as they say that one thing – boom – no sleep for you Sally. So I take myself back home, my neighbour scanning the street at his open door until I’ve safely closed mine, and go to work checking the usual hiding places for bulbous-eyed sexual perverts. Satisfied there are none, I lock everything that can be locked and flit into bed, hoping that I won’t be turned into part of a human centipede during the night.

I tell you this so that you will understand that I don’t take pleasure in pissing people off, but this really has to be said. Five Guys is not good.

I’m not sure that I’ve got the vocab to sufficiently tell you why you shouldn’t eat here, but I’ll try. The burgers are tepid; the meat is a passionless patty of miscellaneous cow, set in a wad of hardened processed cheese in a characterless white bun. The mouthfeel is all wrong – like when a dentist takes a mould of your teeth with the green Plasticine thing, the food lodges in your mouth in a bland lump.

The hot dog is worse. The dog part is a cold stick made up of a mish mash of fragments of I-don’t-know-what, and the bun clings to it apathetically.

I’ll stop, because lets not be malicious. If you want a burger, go here, here, or here. Here at a stretch. Fuck, even this is better.