The Lamb Inn

Once again my travels find me in a pub...

The Lamb Inn to be precise. It is an oddly located pub nestled behind main street buildings in Orford place. It could easily be missed unless it is somewhere you are specifically aiming for. The question is, was it worth seeking out and sampling their food? Without further ado I shall begin...

The Burger

With a reasonable selection of burgers on the menu I thought I would opt for their A game burger. Go for the best and really see what they bring to the table.

WAGYU BURGER £13.99 Wagyu is a Japanese breed of cattle, specially bred for its intense flavour and premium beef. We top our Wagyu burger with melted Camembert and streaky bacon

For those of you that may not know what Wagyu beef is here is a brief description. It is a japanese breed of cow that is lovingly fed a rich diet giving the meat a marbled texture. It is this high fat content that melts during cooking to give the rich flavour. Due to this it is horribly expensive so the fact that this burger was only £13.99 is a worrying start.

I will cut straight to it here, it was insanely dry. So dry I really cannot comprehend it or put it into words. Cast your mind back to late last summer when all of Norfolk's old people lost it because their vegetable patches and lawns were in ruin because of the heat and dry weather. Now times that by ten. When asked for medium rare I was told it could only be served well done as that was how it came. Not entirely sure what to make of this. Was it bought in pre-cooked and then re-cooked? That would explain why it was so unbelievably dry. Either way the burger slice proved difficult with the provided prison grade cutlery that could barely cut a panna cotta. A steak knife or perhaps a japanese samurai sword would have been more fitting. Please by all means correct me if I am wrong so I will gladly await a photo of your chefs lovingly blending Wagyu beef patties. During the eating my mouth actually became an A level science experiment as osmosis began sucking moisture out of my mouth to flood back into the burger. As a result it was really hard to establish a taste from this burger. It had a meaty taste but not one I would consider to be particularly good. It was like a Tescos 8 burgers for £2 sort of thing since it seemed to have that processed taste you get from frozen burgers. 

All the other ingredients in this concoction were masked by this flavour unfortunately. So I genuinely cannot recall anything about bacon other than it wasn't really crispy. I can't remember anything about the cheese even though I was taking notes at the time. It's like it brought on momentary taste and memory loss. The bun was ok though.

Now what gives me the right to judge Wagyu beef burgers? I have actually spent a large portion of time travelling Japan and sampled both Wagyu and Hida beef direct from the source and I can quite honestly say this does not do it justice at all, nor does it even vaguely represent the quality of the beef. In all honestly I think here the term wagyu is just used to ramp up the price tag unnecessarily without an actual increase in quality. It would of been better to go to a local Norfolk butchers and use local meat. As I previously said it is some of if not the most expensive meat going. I would be interested to know firstly what cut the wagyu was from in this burger and also the percentage.

Sides

I thought it couldn't get any blander. The chips were standard bought in variety and to make it worse were actually quite soggy. Huge disappointment. When all you have to do is fry them it's not really difficult, though maybe they were freshly fried and crispy and just went soggy during the one hour it took us to get our food. That is a mystery we will never know the answer to.

Overall

Well it filled a gap. In general this was pretty poor and quite a big price tag for it. Nothing seemed freshly prepared and the waiting time for food was well over one hour. The burger tasted awful and was very dry so all other components suffered at its merciless hands. My advice would be to take this off the menu along with a lot of other stuff and focus of a few dishes executed to perfection.

2/10

The Lamb Inn
Orford Place
Norwich

NR1 3RU