Across the road from the office is Arizona Bar and Grill. As
its name suggests, it normally dishes up fairly standard American Tex/Mex type
food, and normally I don’t give it much patronage. However a colleague of mine
went there for their Burger Wellington entrant, the Scorching Buck Burger, and
gave it a good review so I thought I’d darken their doorstep once again and see
if it was up to scratch.
The description is this:
Slow-cooked Wairarapa venison with red onion escabeche,
chipotle mayo and coleslaw in a Brezelmania cornmeal-dusted bun, with cajun
fries. Garage Project beer match: Texas Tea
This is interesting in itself as it’s the first burger I’ve
come across where the beer match is Garage Project’s Texas Tea – a dark and
rich beer with a chilli bite. I tried this at Garage Project when I went there last Friday, and remember thinking at the time that it would be interesting to
try this with an actual chilli-flavoured meal, on the principle that you drink
sweet wines with puddings – the chilli flavours should cancel out and you get
more of the flavour of the beer coming through.
So, what's it like? As was immediately apparent, this burger had been breadcrumbed. OK, that's probably to hold together what would otherwise become quite a fragile patty, but under the breadcrumbs was a layer of batter, before you got to the meat. It was a carbohydrate too far - you've got your chips, and your bun, already. The meat was slow-cooked, tender, and very tasty, so good points there; but I ended up pulling the meat out of the batter to eat it. The chipotle mayo was spread extremely thin on the top bun, and failed to register any kind of chilli hit. The thick-cut chips added to the carbohydrate-ness of the meal - although their Cajun dusting was the only discernible chilli flavour in the whole shebang. The Texas Tea provided more hotness than any of the burger elements, which failed to "scorch" in any way, shape or form.
A bit of a disappointment, then, and I can only award this burger 6/10.
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