Gourmet Cafe
1/F, Shanghai Centre, 1376 Nanjing Xi Lu,
Nanjing Xi Lu
near Tongren Lu, Metro Line 2 Jing'an Temple Station
南京西路1376号上海商城1楼
近铜仁路, 地铁2号线静安寺站
6289-5733
Open 11am-12 midnight
Price Y100-Y199 per couple
Accepts International Credit Cards
- Share with a friend
- Add a review
- Add an event here
- Report corrections or abuse
- Is this your business?
Claim it!
- City Weekend says
This is one of the best specialty burger shops in town. Owner William Bray has cooks up a wide selection of exotic and often creatively-named burgers, from basic sliders to much more complicated beef and chicken concoctions. Be sure to save room for a side of crunchy onion rings and one of their deliciously creamy milkshakes.
- Contributor Description
Reviews
Been there? Add a review!
Dear GC, I love you so much. Every single time, since you have opened in SC, the tom chutney burger is ALWAYS top quality, excellent cooked and made. Your standards never drop! Moreover, your kids chicken burger is a massive guarantee of delight and consumption. My only problem with you is that you don't have a Lujiazui restaurant... please please put one there!
Just went there for the first time for the Monday night burger deal. mmmmm. So good! I had the Salmon Rusdie burger and friends got the Holy Guacamole and Brie burgers. They were all excellent--lots of meat and very fresh, tasty toppings. A little pricey perhaps if it hadn't been buy 1, get 1, but I'll definitely be back on future Mondays. Seriously giving Blue Frog a run for their money!
Went for dinner yesterday and we ended up having dry & crumbly burger patties. For RMB55 without fries, the size of the burger was relatively small. Maybe should have tried during lunch since most of the good reviews are from the lunch crowd. Given up hope on all these premium burger joints. I will stick to Blue Frog from now on!
I went for lunch and I just ordered a classic burger without extra. The meat was cooked as I asked and the quality was really good. Then the service from the beginning to the end was really perfect, attentive without being too much, polite (my glass of water went on the floor and they immediately cleaned, changed it and all of that with smile).
I dig Gourmet Cafe, both for their burger and milkshake selection. It is a definite stop at least once a month to get my grub on. Little known fact about Gourmet Burger that just makes my day: the 90s rap music playing inside the restaurant. They've got an excellent music selection to go with the meal. And I am feeling Gourmet Cafe on that.
heard much about the mini burger, and decided to give it a try for my friend's bday dinner. to my surprise, we could choose from a selections of mini burgers. the beef patties tasted almost similar. We ordered the onion rings, and to my surprise, it was pretty oily and tasteless. I guessed we ordered that for phototaking purposes only. We ordered the garlic fries too and it was my favourite out of all! It was so tasty and yummy, i love the garlic crumbs.
I was pleased to find "Burger in a Bowl", a non-carb option replaced with salad! So I ordered the one with moomoo-something, with a medium patty. The patty was juicy and yummy, while the salad was generous.
My friend was raving alot about the nice burger bun, but I still preferred my non-carb option anyway!
The service was good, and the staff was friendly. She even offered to upgrade me to an executive lunch set with a free coke!
Better than most burgers i've tried around shanghai.
Tonight I walked past Gourmet Café and felt an old stab of guilt, the sort that designates six month old emails from friends you always liked but never got that close to and are bad at replying to.
Almost year ago I had a very, very bad experience dining…lunching…at Gourmet Café’s current location. It was a dramatic combination of multiple mixed up orders, delayed service, and the horror that are avocados – details below for the morbid. I am a great fan of customer feedback, can never resist an airline survey, and force my assistant to keep all of the taxi companies on her autodial – although I compliment as much as I complain – and bounced on here to bitch.
Will Bray, the owner of Gourmet Café, almost immediately contacted me with his apologies, his assurance that the rude manager had been dispatched, and an invitation to come in with a friend for a meal on the house. Ooh! impossible to resist.
We went in November and got the VIP treatment – which of course cannot attest to their general situation, but for a busy day things appeared running quite smoothly. The food was great, as always – we found though that the portabella burger outperforms the tuna, startlingly. Both nice, though, and for a pescavore-vegetarian it is such a nice place for a burger fix that won’t make you sick later.
I haven’t been recently (see: above: guilt) and can’t attest to how it is faring currently. However, in terms of conscientiousness of management, to the point of caring what random people post on websites, Gourmet Café and Will take customer service seriously. I may have taken a long time to post about this – it requires procrastination – but I have told many, many, many people individually about the follow-up courtesy, and now it is my turn to apologize that the public kudos took so much longer than their amends. Good show, good place, good people.
Mediocre burgers at best.
Have gone here for dinner a couple of times and find the service good and the food quality great. Have to agree with some other reviewers that there is no basic burger option. However, the reason that I am writing today is that me and my family went there this weekend for breakfast and loved it! First of all, they open at 8:00 AM on weekends and 7:00 AM during the weekday - great for families as most kids won't wait until 10:00 when most restaurants in town open for brunch. The decor is fun, staff is friendly, and the food choices are executed perfectly AND they have a great outdoor space - have no doubt this will be our new breakfast spot for the spring/summer! Just wish they offered the bottomless cup of coffee with their meal sets.
i agree - a basic burger - no frills - just the patty onion and salad!!
i love the burgers here, but sometimes you cant beat the original!
owners - please take note...
My wife and I went to see how Gourmet Cafe handle basics like burgers and shakes. I was immediately a bit concerned when I saw the menu, as there was no option for a simple plain burger, or a plain cheese burger--the closest thing was a cheese burger with a lot of condiments such as peppers and salsa--and most burgers were topped with far more than this. My concern was due to the menu's apparent similarity to Gourmet Burger Kitchen in the UK, where the quality of the beef is continually plummeting but they seem to get away with this by burying the burgers in myriad toppings.
My wife ordered a four-burger tasting platter (cheese etc., tuna, falafel and thai chicken), and I ordered the black pepper burger, medium, which seemed to be the simplest thing on offer. My wife definitely got the better deal--all of her burgers were outstanding, especially the tuna and thai chicken; even her tiny cheese burger was nicely cooked, and because it was so small it was missing the extra condiments, which in my opinion was a bonus. My burger, on the other hand, was not cooked medium at all, and was on the extra well side of well-cooked, not at all what I had ordered or hoped for. The quality of the beef (and the grilling) was therefore impossible to discern. I would have sent it back but my experience in doing so is that it usually just ends poorly, and to be fair the peppercorn crust was enjoyable. The other positive note was the chocolate milkshake, which was even better than those from Munchies--so good in fact, that we splashed out and ordered a second for dessert--along with a slice of the best NY style cheesecake we've had in years.
Was a bit shocked when I read the reviews here! I had a great meal here during the week. I was in town this week after being away for a few months and went to try the new location and see what the terrace was like with a colleague of mine from the USA.
We turned up and got a seat out in the sun and ordered a couple of cocktails. I went for a mojito and my colleague went for a martini. Great drinks and much better value than what we found at the Bund later in the evening. The mojito especially was one of the better ones I have had in Shanghai, with heaps of fresh mint.
We went for a couple of burgers. Mine had some sort of Italian ham wrapped around the burger and was delicious. My colleague went for a chilli burger which he announced as authentic. I had a bite and it was tasty - crisp beans and some real kick in the end. We finished off with a bowl of fries and some mayo dip. I love the sauce range available - there is something about ketchup that seems wrong for fries.
We had a couple of Belgian beers with the meals and they seemed to be well priced too. Overall the meal was superb as I find a lot of the burgers I have end up a sloppy mess and these burgers were spot on. Service was not an issue either. My colleague and I don't speak any Chinese and we had no problems ordering and getting the meat cooked at the level we wanted. The drinks and food arrived pretty quickly and the waitress seemed to be on top of things coming back with the right thing the first time. Next time I am in town I will go back for sure.
I was shocked by the poor service at the Shanghai Centre's location of Gourmet Cafe. The manager (when I was there for lunch the other day) was a Western guy who has no idea of good customer service. I had a problem with my lunch order and the waitress suggested I speak to the manager. Out came the manager who basically told me if I am not satisfied I can leave and that he doesn't care if I ever come back! His behaviour was rude, aggressive and inappropriate. He obviously hasn't learned that treating customers with respect (as well as offering a good product) gets repeat business and free advertising in the form of recommendations to friends and colleagues of whom I have many. I will never go back to Gourmet Cafe. I do have some constructive advice for them though - get some customer service pointers from your neighbour Element Fresh for you have A LOT to learn!!
I'm a fan of the original location, but had a horrible experience at the new Shanghai Center one. I ordered a potato wedges and a shrimp burger, and had a pretty protracted conversation with the waitress (who was the manager, Vivian) that it should have NO AVOCADO. I loath the stuff. I waited like 30 minutes without my food coming, and noticed an order of potato wedges, probably mine, gathering dust on the counter for a good ten minutes, without any servers bothering to deliver it, so I got up and got it myself.
15 minutes later my burger came - with avocado. I disgustedly scraped it off, waived Vivian over to complain and to request a fresh piece of lettuce as mine had avocado smeared all over it. She picked up the plate to take it back, I protested that she just needed to bring me fresh lettuce, not send it back, but she insisted. Another fifteen minutes later - and multiple complaints on my part about how long does it take to swap a piece of lettuce? - my burger came back.
With more avocado.
As I no longer had a napkin, the first had been used removing the first round of offending avocado and my requests for another had been ignored, I couldn't remove the stuff myself and so had to send it back a third time. At least it was a shorter wait, but the second round of avocado had been squishier and gotten all over the entire burger, not just the lettuce, so I ended up washing all the ingredients off in my water glass.
It took another 20 minutes to get a fresh glass of water.
They did give me the meal free, but only after I complained some more. The place wasn't even that busy, or noticieably understaffed; and the other staff were mostly more helpful, it was the manager Vivian who was making the same mistake over and over again because she wasn't paying attention.
I'll add that, while I was there, the couple next to me also waited about an hour for their food to come; and I noticed several other customers just left after waiting protractedly for their food.
Gourmet Cafe: good food - if you ever get it.
First I need to say: I'm not a burger person. But when the boys want their burgers, you say okay, I can do Gourmet Cafe. On a recent visit, I had the L'Avorella (avocado, mozarella, bacon, sun-dried tomato relish), and I enjoyed it. The fries could have been better but the strawberry milkshake I had was good. And the burger itself, well, even the guys who had plain cheeseburgers agreed they were definitely among the very best in Shanghai and debated whether Carl's Jr was better (as far as I'm concerned, this is not in the same category of burger joints). Service was pleasant, too; worth a visit!