King Eddy is doing burgers right

• Address: 47 Clarence St.

• Sides and Snacks: $5.99 to $9.99

• Everything else: $12.99 to $47.99 (family meal)

• Diet: Gluten-free and vegetarian available

• Wheelchair accessibility: Yes

• LCBO Licensed: Yes

• Website

Back in the day the ByWard Market had a great around-the-clock dining destination in Bagel Bagel. You’d come back, all lit up from dance and drink in Hull, and have one of their delicious cheese bagels to help bring you back to earth.

It may not be a 24-hour destination, but The King Eddy is a welcome addition to the market in both the diversity and reasonable pricing of its menu. Then there’s the design of their new location: minimalist-Scandinavian-industrial-chic is the mouthful I’ve chosen. It’s bright, airy and calming.

I was there for one thing only and so I ordered the King Eddy burger with onion rings. Then a classic Steam Whistle Pilsner to wash it down. Turns out it was a proper choice.

After two pages in on Bill Browder's latest on Russian corruption Freezing Order and my lunch arrived. It was quick and what a photogenic pile it was. It’s the sort of burger only seen in ad campaigns.

Well done and as it turns out, super delicious. Little did I know that I would inhale what was on the plate in its entirety. It’s extremely rare that I will finish a meal like this. Then again, it’s little things like the fact that they grind all their burger meat in-house and use a variety of cuts in the mix, that makes their burgers stand out from the crowd.

I’ll admit this now, I’ve eaten at many burger joints in Ottawa and won’t say a word about them because it’s one depressing episode after another and it’s never interesting to listen to a track that continuously skips. The King Eddy burger has all the energy and uplifting verve of listening to The Jam’s Down in the Tube Station at Midnight for the first time. I couldn’t get enough of it.

A year ago I enjoyed some stellar onion rings at O’Reilly’s Pub in Perth and the King Eddy version, while slightly different, was equally excellent. Yes, the Steam Whistle was exactly the crisp refreshing tonic needed for the hot and crispy ring jackets and before I knew it, I was done. Not that my server would know me from a hole in the wall, but I couldn’t help sharing my pride in having cleaned my plate. She was at least gracious about it and smiled.

The King Eddy appears to be operating under a fair-pricing ethos: their cocktails are priced at $12 and a modest but well-chosen selection of bottled wines hovers around a 100 percent markup. Even their beer prices are fairer than we could expect and every day between 3 and 6 pm they have Power Hour, where select beverages are specially priced. A real bargain backed by professional service and they delivered the nicest burger I’ve yet had in the city.