I read about the sansrival of Burger Machine from Pepper and I was definitely curious. It doesn’t help that I have never tried a burger from there. But on one hot sunny day, on my way home, I decided to try it. Reading it from a friend’s Facebook thread was the final push.
What is Burger Machine? For those who grew up in Manila, it’s a common site on random street corners. Just a small kiosk that can be run by one person. It’s a permanent stand, not those rolling street food. They sell burgers, obviously. But there was never one near enough me that I can walk to it as a hungry kid or teen. Their burgers are cheap. Maybe P25, depending on your add-ons. But basically, it is cheap burgers.
So I went down, looked at their so many banners, and found it. P18 sansrival. It wasn’t huge, so the price seemed just fitting. But sansrival is such an artisanal cake that you don’t expect it to be available, in all places, Burger Machine. But there I was, under the hot sun, holding two different flavored sansrival, the original and the mocha.
They were individually wrapped and sealed, which gave me a slight comfort of eating the “dirty” food (one reason I think I never touched it growing up). On the first bite, I knew that the stock was old. It was so chewy, none of the crisp interior I was expecting. And this was the same for the other flavor. True, it was only P18. But with the raves of the few that I have read, I expected it to be way better, fresher at least.
I would like to try a freshly delivered batch of sansrival. I would think that it would taste better. I hope it would. But then, based on that one taste, I felt that I wasn’t really missing anything all this time.
Domestic Urbanite 