Cheese, Beets And Meat

The weather forecast was for rain today, but by lunchtime it had failed to materialise, so I went with my original intention, and hot-footed it down to Egmont Street for a first visit to newly-opened and well-named Egmont Street Eatery. This is a small, unpretentious café serving what appears from their menu to be good quality café-style food. Their Burger Wellington offering is similarly unpretentious – the Cheese, Beets and Meat:

Primestar’s aged beef patty with smoked beetroot relish, fried pickled onions and housemade Jack cheese blend in a fresh steamed bun - all housemade.

There’s no Garage Project beer match, and they’d just run out of Panhead Pilsner, so I had an Emerson’s instead.

It looks like this:

The astute amongst you will notice that there’s no fries, and, curiously, the waiter made no mention of this when I placed my order. Maybe he’s not a Humanities graduate*.

The burger was half-wrapped in greaseproof paper to assist with handling, but it probably didn’t even need that – it was not a leaky burger, unlike some that I’ve had, and unlike some New Zealand houses. The meat was cooked medium – still a hint of pinkness, which was good to see. I didn’t notice any discernible smokiness to the beetroot relish, but it was tasty – not overpoweringly vinegary or sweet, just in the Goldilocks zone. The onions had been battered and deep-fried, but they weren’t those massive onion rings consisting largely of batter that some places insist on putting in a burger, for reasons that they could probably best explain themselves. All in all, this was a good, well-formed, well-cooked burger. A side of shoestring fries would have set it off nicely. As it was, I award this an 8.

Egmont Street Eatery was a busy place, albeit small, and I think it warrants closer attention at a future date.

* in case you need to know:

The science graduate asks "why does it work?"

The engineering graduate asks "how does it work?"

The humanities graduate asks "do you want fries with that?"