The Temple Bar

Update July 2015 - The Temple Bar has recently been refurbished and now specialises in South Asian Street Food.

Word up burger fans.

Today the team visited The Temple Bar in Brighton having been seduced by their Facebook page and more importantly the Brighton Burger Challenge, a brain child of Chef Russell Tisbury.

The challenge allows lionhearted burger lovers to attempt to tackle 50oz of ground local beef, 1lb of melted mature cheddar, 8 rashers of smoked bacon, 8 sliced gherkins, 1 sliced red onion, dressed salad leaves, home made tomato chutney and mustard, all served in an enormous soft seeded brioche bun with 1lb of skinny hand cut fries!

All this costs just £35.00 and is actually donated to a local charity; unless of course you manage to eat it all, in which case you get your money back, a t-shirt proclaiming your magnificence and a place on the Wall of Fame (so far nobody's managed it!)

Now, unfortunately we weren't able on this occasion to sample this behemoth because a) we didn't tell Russell we were coming in advance and b) in reality none of us were mentally prepared to take it on - rest assured we'll be back.

We did however get tucked in to some of the other delicious looking burger menus items. All the burgers are made from 28 day hung Sussex red beef from a local farm which is minced on site daily.

Breaking with tradition each of the tasting team selected a different burger from The Temple's excellent menu.

Stuart plumped for the 'Plain Dwayne' with cheese and soft onions (a little off-piste with this one but they were happy to oblige). Dan opted for the 'Juicy Lucy', which was pretty much the same as Stuart's only bigger, and Greg tucked into 'El Matador', a cheeky little latino number with crisp chorizo picante, melted cheese and ali oli.

Firstly, I've got to say that in terms of quality of ingredients, there really can be no complaints. The meat itself was fantastic, juicy and mouthwateringly tasty (I'm salivating now as I write this). The bun was good, nice and soft, although some of the team found it unable to contain the beast within!

Personally, I loved the skinny hand cut skin on fries. They were my personal favourite from all the places we've visited so far, although the other testers still rate Hove Place's hand cut chips as a cut above (pardon the pun).

The dressed salad was also of a very high quality. Some amongst us, who's name begins with Tristan, generally grumble if their burger comes within 100 yards of anything green, but I thought the salad was tasty and the dressing was lovely.

The food was great, indisputably.

Unfortunately, the overall scores have been brought down a little by the venue itself and the fact that an unforeseen kitchen electrical problem meant we were waiting over an hour for our food to arrive.

Russell himself came up to keep us informed of the situation and we were given a free round of drinks to compensate, so overall it was handled very well.