Double Cheeseburger at Tuen Grilli, Lappeenranta, Finland

I'm flying to LA tomorrow for couple of meetings. This will be my first trip to LA since I started this blog so be prepared for some serious burger tourism. I kind of started my burger tourism part of the trip already in Finland after dropping my family to parents-in-law who live in South East Finland. On my way back to Helsinki I stopped in Lappeenranta after I had heard stories about a small grill kiosk which serves excellent burgers.

The grill kiosk culture in Finland has long roots and basically the menu is the same in every place with little specials depending in what part of the country you are. The basic menu items are french fries with sausage/meatballs, Finnish meat pies, hot dogs and burgers. Normally burgers have a frozen meat like substance as a patty but when you are drung and grave for vitamin x you don't care or taste anything as long as it's bad for you and is full of grease. Today, a typical grill kiosk has a pure beef burger as a special high price item on their list.

Tuen grilli seems like a typical Finnish grill kiosk. A small building with a stand in front of it. The cool thing is that this place is not located in the corner of the public park in the center of town like these places usually are. Their small 'shed' stands in the middle of residental area across the street to a school close to local hockey stadium. The use only pure beef pattys for their burgers, that's not common. Their pattys come from the freezer but it's still rare for Finnish grill kiosk to only serve pure beef pattys. They serve all standard grill kiosk food from burgers to Finnish meat pies and different variations of fries.

Double Cheeseburger at Tuen Grilli is a triple-decker burger with two meats and two cheddar cheese slices. You can choose your condiments from lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, american sauce, garlic sauce, mustard and ketchup. The bun is not the standard fluffy burger bun that you normally see in Finnish grills. It's big, fresh and firm enough to hold the burger without crumbling to your hand, and it's nicely grilled from the inside. They actually cut their buns to triple-decker buns themself. As I mentioned earlier, meat was pure beef but unfortunately it came from the freezer and were the standard freezer patty. Whatever it is, it works well. This burger is really tasty, they don't over grill the meat and it as juicy as ready made freezer pattys can be. Burger was piled nicely, it was easy to eat and you didn't get too much condiments. I had everything on it except mustard and ketchup, and even if the sauces are basic supermarket stuff it works when there's not too much of everything. Everything seemed to been fresh, even the tomato slice was sliced in front of my eyes.

This was definetly the best burger I've tasted so far in Finland. With a freshly grounded beef this might been a candidate to my top burger list. Recommended!

--
Tuen Grilli
Parkkarilankatu 43
53200 Lappeenranta, Finland
+358-05-415-6002


Larger Map