We Tried “Australia’s Best Burger” – but Is Someone Telling Whoppers?

Sizzle me timbers – the burger at The Gidley has just been named Australia’s best, placing ninth globally on a list of 10 compiled by World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants, a prestigious guide that sends “steak ambassadors” to review hundreds of upmarket grills on five continents.

According to the guide, The Gidley is the 24th best steak restaurant in the world, trailing Neil Perry’s Margaret in third position, Rockpool Sydney at eight and Victor Churchill Melbourne at 11. And regardless of how you feel about them, these lists mean big business for the restaurants on them.

When Broadsheet went to The Gidley last week, waitstaff said the restaurant had served 100 burgers during the previous lunch service. The restaurant was apparently so slammed it had to turn people away. In 2024, a year mired in hospitality closures, that kind of hype is priceless.

Not that The Gidley really needs gimmicky guides to lure diners back. Like Liquid & Larder’s other venues – Alfie’s, The Rover and Bistecca – it’s an outstanding restaurant by anyone’s measure. The Martinis are frosty and diluted to perfection. The service is razor sharp. And if your iron levels are low – oh boy, you’ve come to the right bloody place.

On the globe-spanning list of only 10 burgers, there’s one from Tokyo beef temple Wagyumafia. Another from New York’s Nowon, a Korean-American fusion joint. Tellingly, the list skews towards London, where the guide’s HQ is based. There you’ll find not one but four chonky bois, two of them in Shoreditch.

But I’m lucky enough to live in Sydney, the home of “Australia’s best burger”, in residence at The Gidley and – by popular demand – The Rover in Surry Hills, too. There’s no way on earth I’d turn down an invitation to try it.

A well-dressed man arrives silently at the table holding a white plate with the $26 burger and two pickle spears on it. “The moment you’ve been waiting for,” he says, knowingly. My kneejerk reaction is to whip the phone out and start snapping. But for better or worse (mostly better), The Gidley encourages guests, very politely, to surrender their phones when they arrive, effectively making this the Berghain of burgers.

Then, the server puts on a white glove and picks up a knife. He cuts the burger in half. There’s no oozing fissure of sauce and cheese. No squished potato bun. It remains neat as a pin.

The results, I can report, taste delicious. You get the intense, savoury flavour of beef (Riverine sirloin chain meat; Coppertree farms retired dairy cow chuck and brisket), dry-aged for up to six weeks at Alfie's. A lot of these fancy burgers come with a thick patty that’s deliberately served blue – to the point it starts to feel like a race to the bloody bottom. This one comes with two thin smashed patties, perfectly charred and blushing. Canary-gold cheese blankets them both. I could’ve used a bit more drip on the sauce front, but having a pair of sauce-covered paws in a place as nice as this wouldn’t have felt right.

Ranking criteria isn’t listed on the guide’s website, so I emailed them and asked for it. Taste and “overall appearance” of the burger are paramount, followed by the quality of the ingredients used. When it comes to the patty? The beef breed, cut, fat content and cooking method are all taken into account. The texture of the bun and whether it’s an “artisanal or industrial” product was also important. Ditto for expertise of service staff.

“We are strong advocates of the ‘less is more’ principle,” Tim Craemer, head of restaurant ranking at World’s Best Steaks, tells me. “When it comes to a burger, it’s easy to overcomplicate things.”

Fair cop, this burger ticks all those boxes. And while it isn’t a stretch to say The Gidley may very well be the number 24 steak restaurant in the world, now I’m thinking it might even have the ninth-best burger, too. If not, it’s easily one of the best in Sydney.