Mothertruckin' Monster

Finding a burger on the final Friday of Wellington On A Plate in the CBD is tricky. My original choice for yesterday, Portlander, was fully booked. My alternate for today, The Thistle Inn – fully booked. So I found myself exploring the option of Thunderbird Café. Last time I tried there, there was a queue almost out of the door, but today, although all the tables were full, they were able to clear a space for me at the end of the counter where I could sit and eat a burger.

Their burger in the Burger Wellington competition is the Mothertruckin’ Monster, described like this:

Wagyu beef patty, Randwick Meats bacon, Kāpiti smoked cheddar and Thousand Island dressing in a Pandoro bun, with onion rings and dirty milkshake shot.

Sounds great! But since I copied that from the website, they’ve changed the description to this:

Island Bay Beef patty with bacon and Swiss cheese in a pandora bun with house made onion ring and hundred thousand island dressing.

So that’s quite a drop in quality and “extras”. I’m still wondering how hundred thousand island dressing differs from thousand island.

They’re not participating in the Garage Project beer match, but they do sell Pils’n’Thrills, so I had one of those with it.

It looked like this:

Fortunately, I was able to squish it down a bit and pick it up. They’ve tackled the lettuce-leaf-hanging-out problem by shredding the lettuce. Unfortunately this means small bits of lettuce fall out of the burger while you’re eating it. I’m coming to the conclusion that lettuce really has no place in a burger and you’re better off leaving it out altogether. The patty was quite thick, but did not fill the circumference of the bun, so you’re left with edge bits that are just bready bread with no filling. The patty was cooked medium rare, which was good, and the bacon was there, but I couldn’t really taste the cheese. The onion rings didn’t really add much to the overall flavour of the burger. You’ll notice, too, from the description that there are no fries included with this burger, and once again, the waitress wasn’t a humanities graduate, so I did without.

Overall, this was a fairly standard burger. It had some nice touches, but not enough to elevate it from the pack. I scored it a 7.