Flamingonaut

Our best-laid plan this Saturday was to check out Capitol Restaurant’s burger offering. That plan went aglay like nobody’s business, as they're taking advantage of the lockdown by doing some reno's; so I looked on the Burger Wellington website to try and find something to replace it. I liked the look of Bin 44’s burger, but their website said no availability until 2:00pm – it’s that dratted 50 people maximum that’s hampering hospitality businesses up and down the country. No matter, let’s try Flamingo Joe’s. We’ve not been there for a while, and they’re doing what appears to be a tasty combo. And they were able to accommodate us.

Their burger is called Flamingonaut, and is described like this: Grassfed beef patty with onion rings, smoked cheddar, coloured poppadom, basil aioli and housemade Jack Daniels sauce in a Brezelmania silver potato bun, with curly fries and burger rings. The Garage Project beer match is Transit of Venus, a cloudy IPA with tropical flavours with which I am already familiar.

It looked like this: 

Silver potato bun actually means black, it would appear. Either that or it’s badly tarnished. Taking the lid off revealed two onion rings and a blue-painted poppadom. As you can see, this was going to make eating a difficult proposition, so I ate the onion rings and poppadom, then reassembled the burger into something that could actually be eaten.

The trend these days is for messy burgers, and for sauce and cheese to dribble down your fingers. This one was no exception. Pace the description, it actually contained two burger patties. Despite this, and the slipperiness of the sauce, the burger maintained its stability and integrity to the end. The curly fries were served with aioli and some burger rings scattered on top. This is a good burger, and better than any of the others I’ve tried so far this competition, so I’m scoring it an 8/10. Tomorrow, I’ll go off-piste and try a non-beef burger.