Frijoles Fodongas Burger

We were casting about for somewhere to get a burger for lunch in Miramar. Polo Café was fully booked, and we couldn’t get through on Coco at the Roxy’s byzantine telephone system. Next up…La Boca Loca. Yes, they had a table!

I’d been along to Moore Wilson's earlier in the day, where they were hosting an open-air event for the entrants in the Mindfood producer awards. I fell into talking with the cheesemaker from Kingsmeade cheese, whose emmental was so sorely lacking from yesterday’s burger experience. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any emmental with him. We then got talking about other cheeses, and I lamented the lack of availability of sheep’s milk. He told me that he milked his own, but that he also sold it, and it would be available at his stall in the Hill Street Farmer’s Market from October (it’s lambing season at the moment, so he hasn’t got any right now).  I took his card and promised to contact him when we’re ready to take up cheesemaking again.

So, the Frijoles Fodongas burger: frijoles are black beans, and this is a vegetarian burger…yes, the dreaded beanburger! It was served in a blue corn gordita (yes, I had to look it up as well). One look at it told me that trying to eat this as a normal burger – i.e. with your hands – would be a mistake; bun integrity would be compromised almost immediately. We tucked in with knives and forks.

As you’d expect with a Mexican dish, it was spicy, but not overly hot. The “burger” was also quite frangible. Accompaniments of spicy potato wedges and a creamy avocado dip rounded out the dish. There was no Garage Project beer match, so I went for that old standby, Tuatara pilsner, to wash it down.

Overall, this was a tasty burger. Next week I’m going to get on with some proper, meat-patty-in-a-bun type burgers, but the introduction to the competition so far has been with two slightly different types of burger. I scored this one 7/10.

The French Onion Soup Burger

And they’re off! Yes, I’m starting my annual burger odyssey with exactly the same phrase as last year. After all, a tradition is a tradition. It’s Wellington On A Plate time, and with it, the Burger Wellington competition.

First up this year was a visit to The General Practitioner, to check my burger health. This year’s offering was the French Onion Soup Burger. First, let me read you the description on the Wellington On A Plate website:

Shaved beef striploin patty with melted Kingsmeade Emmental cheese and caramelised onions on a Pandoro sesame bun, with dipping gravy and bistro frites. Garage Project beer match: Garagista

And here’s how it looked:

The downside: Firstly, the description definitely uses the word “patty”. There was no patty. There was shaved beef. Secondly, the Kingsmeade Emmental cheese was conspicuous by its absence. Despite this, it was, to coin a phrase, a tasty burger meat sandwich. The beef was nicely rare, and the frites and dipping gravy were particularly good.

The matching beer, Garagista, was also a tasty brew – a typically heavily hopped IPA with bags of flavour and a long, grapefruity aftertaste.  The waitress managed to knock my first one over whilst trying to land my board, so I got another can (yes, it comes in cans…despite this, it’s very good) on the house.

As expected, not the greatest burger meat sandwich, and if it’s the worst one I have this year, I won’t be at all disappointed. I scored it 6/10.

What We Do In The Shadow Limits

What We Do In The Shadows is a 2014 New Zealand mockumentary which follows the exploits of a group of Wellington vampires. It’s been a big hit in New Zealand. It’s very funny and you should go and see it if you get the chance – it will be released in Europe on or around Halloween.

A “Shadow Limit” is a banking term which describes an unadvised limit which allows a credit-worthy customer to borrow beyond their authorised overdraft or credit card limit.

What We Do In The Shadow Limits is our team name for the Battle Of The Brains 2014 charity quiz night organised by ANZ.  This year the theme is “A Night at the Movies”, hence our choice; surprisingly (to me at least) we were the only ones with that idea. In previous years we’ve gone as Yes We Can!, Grexit and Gorgeous Georges.

I scored my costume off TradeMe - it was a cheap option - and accessorized it with my own waistcoat. We had semi-professional make-up done by one of the team members who does stage make-up. Whilst some of our team opted for the full white-face and undead look, I decided on just the dribbling blood. I also had some vampire fangs, but these turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, so I ditched them. The rest of our team headed down to the Costume Cave to get vampire costumes, where they found that they couldn't just get costumes like those from the film - they could get the actual costumes! The film had been a very low-budget affair, and apparently they'd hired from Costume Cave rather than have a fully-fledged costume department.

Suitably attired, we made our way over to the TSB Arena for the quiz. It's been held here since the earthquake in August 2013 damaged the Amora Hotel, which was our previous venue. It's not as intimate a venue, and the event does get a bit lost in the cavernous space, as opposed to the ballroom at the Amora.

There has also been a bit of a change in the organisation, and we no longer get updates throughout the evening to see where we are on the leader board, which is a bit of a retrograde step. They announced the top three teams halfway through, but we weren't in that, so had no idea how we were doing. Nevertheless, we ploughed on regardless, buying beer (part of the price contributed to Daffodil Day) and buying raffle tickets, which failed to net us anything. We were also robbed when it came to the best costume competition - Mrs Brown won that.

So that's that for another year. When I find out where we finally placed I'll update this.

Our Parents Children

BATS Theatre have been producing their Young And Hungry season of short plays over the last week or so. We went along to see Our Parents Children, a play which tells the story of how the world is repopulated after a disaster. The disaster in question is a virus released by an American extremist, Joe. He plans to repopulate the world with clones of himself and his New Zealand accomplice and protagonist of this story, Mary, who he has met online. As the story progresses, we find out more about Mary’s background. She then goes on to her cloning experiment, but makes some crucial modifications to Joe’s plan...by not including him in it.

The production wasn't up to the high standards of other plays we've seen around Wellington - very much a student piece, which is what you might expect from something called "young and hungry". The cast seemed to have a lot of unnecessary members, and not all the elements of the play were well explained. The male characters, in particular, were very sketchy...although this may have been intentional given the theme.

Afterwards we headed out down Cuba Street to Matterhorn, only to be told that it would be 45 minutes before we could expect a table. So we decided to got to Scopa instead, and had a very good dinner there.

Burgeration

A week ago, I blogged about how Charley Noble’s Burger Wellington entry seemed to closely resemble their everyday burger on the menu. I sent a link to my blog to the organisers of Wellington On A Plate, who have replied to me with this information:

" We've been in touch with the team at Charley Noble to get the low-down on what burger they're entering in this year's challenge and can assure you that their burger will be different to the burger currently listed on their regular menu. They didn't have the finer details of their entry ready when the Visa Wellington On a Plate brochure went to print, hence the description in the programme sounding similar to the burger you enjoyed when you dined at Charley Noble recently. The waiter who served you at lunch was a new team member and therefore not completely up to speed yet with the Visa Wellington On a Plate DINE Wellington menu.

We're happy to share their burger with you now:

Introducing the Charley Noble Caribbean Pirate Burger!

Featuring a beef patty, grilled pineapple pickle, Monterey Jack cheese, crispy bacon and smoked chilli relish, and served with a side of "smoke and rum" punch. 

Arrrr, blow me down, that sounds like a right beauty. "

As the man in orthopaedic shoes said: I stand corrected.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that comments and feedback are given due attention by the organisers. Whether I’ll be trying their burger is still debatable, as competition is fierce to get on my shortlist and I want to try some of the more exotic burgers as well as the standard ones.  More on this once the event gets under way!

Tell Me More

Tell me more, tell me more

Like does he have a car?

Thirty five years after its original release, Grease has finally arrived in New Zealand. OK, not quite true. There’s a new production of Grease at the Wellington Opera  House, so we decided to go along on a Friday night.

We stopped in at a new place on Courtenay Place for a bite to eat. Basque is a tapas bar, and they’d done the obligatory GrabOne deal to tempt people in – four pintxos and two drinks for $15. The pintxos are bite-sized tapas – canapés really – and we then went on to order a whole lot more, and called that “dinner”. Very good they were, too.

The show followed the plot of the film but without the outdoor locations. The car race was scrapped completely – probably a bit unfeasible to try and reproduce that on stage – but all the other key elements were there, and, of course, we knew all the songs. It was very well produced and sung with a cast of around 40 or so. As well as the big set pieces (Summer Nights, Greased Lightning, Grease Is The Word, You’re The One That I Want) there were particularly good solo renditions of Beauty School Dropout and Alone At A Drive In Movie by the two leads.

A Bit Of A Cheat

The Wellington On A Plate Burger Wellington competition kicks off in less than a month’s time. Today, at lunchtime, we went to Charley Noble Eatery & Bar, where I had their burger. I asked the waiter about whether they were entering the Burger Wellington competition, and what their entry would be. “Oh, I don’t think it’s been finalised yet” was his reply.

I am deeply suspicious. All the burgers are listed on the Wellington On A Plate website, so I checked out what theirs was. It’s described thusly:  

Shooting Charley's Burger - $24

Taylor Prestonʼs beef patty with On Trays Monterey Jack, bacon and pickles, with house cut chips.

This sounds suspiciously like what I had for lunch, so I checked their menu online. It says:

HOUSE BEEF BURGER 26.00

Monterey Jack, bacon, pickles, house cut chips

That sounds like the same burger to me.

Now, it was a good burger, but I’m deducting marks for laziness. Also, I know that I can cross them off my shortlist during the WOAP fortnight.