One80°

Andy and I hopped on a bus at lunchtime to go down to Oriental Parade, there to try One80°’s The Fast And The Curious Burger offering. After the disappointment of the meat sandwich at Vivant!, I had specifically checked all my remaining burger choices to ensure they had the word “patty” in them, to make sure we would be served an actual burger. As mentioned before there, are a variety of meats available in this year’s competition, but One80 are the only ones offering an ostrich burger, so I really had to try it.

One80 is on the 7^th floor at Oriental Parade, so has great views out over the harbour and city. The restaurant wasn’t busy, so we were able to secure a window seat with no problem. We had once again matched our burgers with Garage Project beers – myself with Pils ’n Thrills, and Andy with Angry Peaches. The burgers arrived open, with a good helping of what appeared to be twice-cooked hand-cut fries.

 I assembled the burger with the intention of eating it with my hands, but when I squashed it down there was some leakage from the aioli and beetroot chutney, so I decided not to risk my shirt and used a knife and fork instead.

What can I say? What a burger! The best that I’ve had so far, even eclipsing the Polo Café’s Oops! This Might Be A Boom burger of last week. I so wanted to score this a 10…but the inability to eat it with the hands, and also a slight mismatch in the amount of beetroot relish (too much, I felt) held it back from perfection. I’m not in the habit of awarding half marks, so this scored a 9. But it was a better 9 than the Polo Café’s burger.

 The chef was clearly proud of it too, and maybe he hasn’t been selling that many (being located slightly away from the traditional lunchtime areas of Wellington), because he came out of the kitchen to ask us how we’d enjoyed them. Anyway, we assured him that it was the best we'd had this year, so he was happy.