First look: Inside York’s newest restaurant – voted the second best burger joint in Britain

It was back in February when we revealed that one of Britain’s best burger joints was moving to York.

And on Monday (13 May), Burgsy’s Burger House will open its brand-new restaurant.

We’ve been given a sneak peek inside the Castlegate venue – and very smart it looks too.

With its beams, exposed brickwork and rope lights, it’s a far cry from the very first Burgsy’s – a food van on a Whitby industrial estate, run by Marta Gemra and her husband Patryk.

After gaining a reputation for serving up sumptious burgers, they opened a restaurant in Whitby in 2015. This was voted by Tripadvisor last year as the second best UK burger joint.

And now Burgsy’s is in York.

Food and drink

Designed around a wild west theme, the restaurant has hand-made tables, wall art with views of Arizona, a fireplace and a bar.

It is able to accommodate up to 50 people.

Here you’ll be able to try Burgsy’s best seller, the Buffallo Bill – a beefburger with caramelised onions, cheese and home-made ketchup.

Another popular one is Bandit Queen: pulled pork served with barbecue sauce and fresh coleslaw.

Burgers start from £8, served with chips and sides. They also offer fancy fries and lumberjack’s fries from £5.50, and salads for £6-£10.50.

A lunchtime offer from 12-3pm sees a selection of burgers plus fries and a home-made sauce available for £10.

Soft drinks are “served old school” in glass bottles. Plus there are beers from the Baytown Brewery based in Robin Hood’s Bay, wines and spirits.

“In the future our dream is to introduce nice American styled cocktails,” says Marta.

‘Invested all we have’

Marta told YorkMix that they have “invested all we had in it, money-wise, time-wise, love-wise.

“This business is like our third child, we’ve been growing it and nurturing it since it was just a dream in our heads.”

She said:

• We swapped from Whitby to York because we felt we needed to be in a city, after three years of growing the business – especially after being voted 2nd in the UK and all the interest this received.

  It feels like a very big leap to move to a bigger premises and a new city, but this is what we love doing and what we’ve committed to.

  We hope the lovely people of York will see (or taste) our dedication. We’ve relocated to York ourselves, moved our children to new schools, put our all into it.

Ideally they would have have kept both locations “as we loved living and working in Whitby and it will always have a great big place in our hearts, but it just wasn’t possible with the tiny size of our previous premises and with us having a young family at the same time”.

Uncomplicated cuisine

Burgsy’s will be open seven days a week from noon to 9pm.

So far they have hired five people, and hope to grow the team from there.

Marta said their target audience are lovers of good, quality food, who care where the ingredients come from and appreciate shopping locally.

• We hand-make all our burgers, the chicken we use is always free range or better.

  We cook our own sauces, and we try to incorporate as many independent businesses as possible, from the buns baked for us at Fred’s home bakery, through meat, beer, wine, coffee, up to the scoop of ice cream from the Groovy Moo on our homemade brownie.

  But if you don’t care about any of that, just come for a delicious burger! We don’t do any fine or complicated cuisine, but we try to make simple food the best it can be.