This week’s review in our series, the best and worst takeaways according to Just Eat, is King’s Castle in Leyland Road, Lostock Hall. It has a good score of 5.17 out of 6, with customers praising the “amazing” burgers, though there were a number of complaints about late delivery and cold food.
Our order arrived on time and with everything present. I had paid an extra 50p for a larger portion of fries on a £6.09 Fillet of Fire meal. There weren’t a huge amount of fries and they were lukewarm and average, but there were still more than you’d get at a McDonald’s. Nothing to get excited about like the string fries from Greedy Munchkin, but edible with a burger.
The Fillet of Fire burger was wrapped in tin foil and delivered inside a polystyrene box, so it kept its heat nicely. The chicken was juicy and it had a definite spicy kick which set it apart from other takeaway chicken burgers, making it one of the highlights of the order.
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I’d added three Peri Peri chicken wings to the burger meal for an extra £1.50, but they didn’t travel well in their little aluminium carton, becoming floppy skinned, defeated and sweaty.
It was an unfortunate but inevitable outcome, as anyone who has ever become trapped in a size eight dress with a broken zip in an H&M changing room will know. Taste-wise they were okay but quite bland, so perhaps they used just the one Peri instead of two.
Next was the Nik Nakk’d Burger from their speciality section, described as a “fresh handmade beef patty topped with Nik Nak crisps, hot cheese sauce, Thai sweet chilli sauce and lettuce on a brioche bun.” The concept sounded horrible yet strangely compelling, like Love Island or Jack Nicholson, so I went for it.
This burger was also wrapped in tin foil, but although it was still hot the bun had a soggy bottom. There was one strand of lettuce, and the Nik Naks were chewy, either because of the moisture from the cheese and sweet chilli sauce or because they were stale. It was just an odd idea all round, Nik Naks, sweet chilli sauce and cheese are not items that immediately spring to mind as a perfect combination. Not as unholy an alliance as sardines and Turkish delight, or horrible mushrooms and more horrible mushrooms, but not a game-changer like a cheese cube and a pickled onion on a stick.
I don’t know if the small sprinkle of Nik Naks made much of a difference to the taste, but the combination of sweet chilli sauce, cheese sauce and handmade beef pattie was surprisingly tasty. The pattie was good enough to stand as a simple cheeseburger which was also available on the menu at a cost of just £2.49. The addition of one strand of lettuce, a squirt of chilli sauce and a few crisps wasn’t worth the extra £4, so the less fancy option would be better value.
Being a fan of cinema nachos, I had to try the nachos with hot cheese sauce, jalapeno peppers and freshly made salsa. Although the salsa looked more like ketchup, the tanginess was there. The cheese sauce didn’t taste cheesy, but my daughter Ground Zero and her friend enjoyed the combination so there was a lot of eye-rolling at my miserable, joyless opinion and also my cardigan, for some reason.
The last item was a heap of fries in yet more hot cheese sauce for £3.99.
I regretted having ordered them as soon as the box was opened instead of ten minutes after I’d eaten them, which was all wrong. The ghostly, wilted, crinkle cut fries were the worst item of our order, but as we didn’t have a catapult to launch them dramatically back over the King’s Castle walls they just ended up the bin.
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The King’s Castle’s burgers tasted great, but looked grim, and were on the small side for the price. Unfortunately, as the Peri bingo wings, fries and other extras were average or poor I probably won’t order from there again.
Are you so uptight that you get angry about three floppy chicken wings? Let us know in the comments below.