Polo Café

We had the day off on Friday, so took the opportunity to try one of the burgers from one of our local restaurants, the Polo Café. Their burger is called Oops! This Might Be A Boom Burger, and consisted of a spiced lamb patty with Zany Zeus paneer, served with Bombay potatoes. The waitress warned us about the spiciness of the burger lest it take us by surprise…this is, after all, the land that invented the concept of “kiwi hot”. I found that the spiciness level was about right – this was a good, well-made curry burger.

Once again, I was ripping into the burger before it occurred to me to take a picture, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. The bun was a floured bap, which held together well – no burger collapse here. Polo Café is a well-respected local establishment, and in fact this is the best burger I’ve had so far, and had no qualms about awarding it a 9. I still haven’t found the perfect burger this year, and I’m not sure if anything will match the T Rex burger from last year – but I have more to try next week, so we shall see. 

Duke Carvell's

It was a sunny lunchtime in August. Seasoned Wellingtonians don’t count their chickens, though, and we’re expecting another wind’n’rain extravaganza over the weekend and beyond. Today, though, you’d be forgiven for thinking that spring is on its way.

We walked down Willis Street and Manners Mall, turning off at Cuba Street to reach the fantastically-named Duke Carvell’s Swan Lane Emporium. The very name conjures up 19-century gastronomy, and we were greeted by a chap with splendid moustachios. This is Lorenzo Bresolin, proprietor, who looks like a refugee from The Chap.

The food, though, is definitely 21^st century. We ordered their burger offering, the Flocking To The Duke’s Harem -  a patty made from confit lamb shoulder, with halloumi, red cabbage and cos lettuce garnish, and shoestring chips seasoned with za’atar.

Unfortunately I was well into the burger before I remembered to take a pic, so no art on this one. I will tell you, however, that it was damn tasty and is currently my equal best in the burger ratings – I’m scoring it 8. The bun was toasted and held its integrity through to the end, and the fillings weren’t slippery so burger collapse syndrome was avoided. We washed it down with more beer from the Garage Project – this time their Special K.

Afterwards, we had a chat with Lorenzo, discussing burgers and Burger Wellington – where we’d been so far, what we recommended, what he recommended for us. Some useful tips picked up, and I will try to add Arthur’s to my list of burgers to try.

Shed 5

Another day, another dégustation dinner. Shed 5 is the landmark Wellington restaurant of Masterchef New Zealand judge Simon Gault (he also owns Crab Shack and Pravda in the capital, as well as 5 other restaurants throughout the country), and specialises in seafood.

We arrived at 6:00pm and found our allocated table. As is almost inevitable in Wellington, there was someone at our table who Nicola knew through work. The waitress poured our Palliser Estate Methode Traditionelle, and after a short speech from the head chef, we were off on the first of 8 fish courses – Bluff oysters 3 ways: one natural, one poached and one tempura. All tasty – I liked the raw one best.

There were 8 courses in all, 4 of which could be styled as starters (including the oysters): tuna carpaccio, baby paua with twice-cooked pork belly, and scallop & salmon raviolo:

Baby paua with twice-cooked pork belly

Scallop and Akaroa salmon raviolo

...and two as main courses; one of which was cooked by Sushil Ravikumar, who reached the last 4 on Masterchef New Zealand this year and now works at Pravda. His course was a curried groper fillet with a raita sphere (this involved science, which was explained by head chef Geoff Ngan), mango chutney and spinach, served with a prawn and potato croquette. He demonstrated the cooking techniques and answered questions about cooking and Masterchef.

Sushil Ravikumar demonstrates his cooking skills

The final main course was a surf-and-turf of Angus eye fillet with crayfish and paddle crab thermidor.

Wines were matched throughout from Palliser Estate,  including their Pencarrow pinot noir with the steak.

Nearly there! Just the dessert (a marshmallow mandarin and chocolate sphere) with mulled wine, and finally a parmesan and honeycomb “cigar”, stuffed with gorgonzola, and served with tawny port.

The whole meal kept us up past 11 o’clock, and we left feeling slightly woozy (they’d been generous with the wine servings) and also quite full. To be honest, they could’ve got away with only serving one main course – I guess they just have so much good food, and so much good cooking, that they want to fit in as much as possible! It’s a good job this only comes around once a year.

We have one more event to go to next week, but I’m continuing on my burger adventures in the meanwhile – which will include a trip further afield this weekend. 

Curried Garage

Curry and beer. Beer and curry. Could a food and a drink be better matched? The Garage Project evidently didn’t think so, and invited some of Wellington’s top chefs to come up with a curry to match some of their quirkier beers. Garage Project (so called because they are based in a former petrol station in Te Aro) have brewed some weirdly-named beers in the past, and this evening’s offerings included some of their finest.

We were greeted with a chicken satay and a tin of Pils ’nThrills, and bagged ourselves some spaces at one of the tables set up in the brewery. There wasn’t an awful lot of room as this is not usually a dining venue, and there were only around 30 people present – I’d had to be very quick on the click to secure tickets when they went on sale, they sold out in about 2 minutes!

The first course was a beef vindaloo prepared by John Allred of Osteria Del Toro – this was plenty-much spicy, and washed down with a glass of Cockswain’s Extraordinary ordinary – an English-style bitter served from a hand pump. This was definitely the hottest of the evening’s curries and, to my mind, the best. Next up was Martin Bosley’s chicken and pumpkin, which was a milder, tasty curry served with Red Rocks Reserve – a strong, caramel-flavoured beer which is flash-boiled with superheated volcanic rocks during the brewing process (instead of the more normal approach of applying external heat – this is because the beer is produced by a “steining” process, which involves a wooden kettle rather than a metal one). Third up was a Goan fish curry prepared by Raju Rai of Monsoon Poon, served with Pernicious Weed -  a particularly hoppy IPA which was ameliorated by the curry; and (we were getting quite full by this stage) the final curry, Dhaniwal lamb by Rex Morgan of Boulcott Street Bistro (famed for its winning T Rex burger from last year’s Burger Wellington competition), with Death From Above, a chilli-infused Indochine Pale Ale. This was my second-favourite curry of the night.

A curry

Each of the dishes was a lunch-sized portion of curry, with rice, so we were pretty well full by this time. But wait, there’s more! There was a pudding (fortunately non curry-based) of chilli chocolate brownie, with a glass of Lord Cockswain’s Courage, a Bourbon-barrel-aged porter. Delicious!

Duly stuffed, and just a little hazy, we staggered out into the night. Fortunately it had stopped raining, and even more fortunately, a cab was depositing its customer a few yards down the road and I was able to get home with the minimum of fuss.

Artisan

I called Artisan in the morning to check whether they were busy or I could just walk in. And a good job I did, too, as I was able to book their last table for lunch.

Artisan’s offering is the High-5 Sliders – 5 mini burgers with various fillings as follows: hot-smoked salmon and horseradish; chicken confit; duck and pulled pork; venison and blue cheese; and a “pudding” burger of chocolate mousse in a  doughnut bun.

Why High 5? Well, they’re served on a platter that’s like a small tree:

Does this work? As a concept, it sounds fine. However, only one of the burgers was an actual patty  – the venison burger – which was a bit of a disappointment. The others were either a pâté (salmon and chicken), which had a tendency to shoot out from the burger once you squeezed it together to get a bite out of it; or just meat (the duck/pork combo). Also, the bread/filling ratio wasn’t optimal – although the buns were varied (one with herbs, another with walnuts, a corn bread and a brown bread) the whole meal was a bit too bready. The pudding burger suffered from the same squirt-out-the-sides problem as the chicken and salmon ones.

Accompanying all this was a glass of Parrotdog’s DeadCanary – another Wellington brewery who make a good range of beers. This is a pale ale style beer.

Overall, this looked good on paper, and even on a wooden serving tray…but failed to deliver on taste. Scoring? Not a high 5, but a low 5 from me.

Ti Kouka

This year’s Burger Wellington entries vary wildly in their meat content (oddly, no-one’s doing a vege burger this year), so I thought I’d try some of the more unusual ones as well as the standard beef burger. This lunchtime, a colleague and I wandered down Willis Street to Ti Kouka, a café which specialises in free-range, organic food. Their burger offering was the All About Longbush Pork Burger, which contains pulled pork, bacon and pork belly, served with an Asian-inspired garnish of pickled cucumber, hoisin mayo, coriander and mint leaves, and side dishes of bean sprouts, crackling and chilli relish; the whole served in a steamed bun, and, unusually, no chips. The deal also offered a Garage Project dark German lager (a contradiction in terms, surely?) as accompaniment – The Garage Project’s Smoke And Mirrors.

Firstly, the burger: this was definitely one for eating with a knife and fork – bun integrity would have been compromised by being hand-held. The pulled pork was really good, juicy and tender, and the bacon also very good. The pork belly let it down a little by being on the chewy side. The garnishes really enhanced the burger. I scored the burger a 7.

Secondly, the beer: The Garage Project are a Wellington-based micro-brewery, and have recently been re-popularising the concept of beer in tins; the technology has moved on from the old days, and you no longer get a tinny-flavoured beer. The beer itself, a dark, malty brew, is also a smoked beer (hence the name). Never had a smoked beer? Then try one, if you can find it! (Greenwich Meantime brewery make one in the UK, called Winter Time.) I tried it for the first time at Beervana.

Quack Around The World

After a hard day’s househunting, we set out on a different kind of hunt in the evening: a duck hunt. As part of Wellington On A Plate, we had earlier booked a place at Zibibbo’s, who were offering their Quack Around The World – a dégustation dinner of different ways of cooking duck from different cuisines. After an amuse bouche of duck liver parfait, we had two Asian dishes, one from Vietnam and one from Japan, before moving on to more traditional European duck recipes from Italy and France – a confit duck leg with surprisingly spiced puy lentils and sauerkraut. The pudding was a crème catalan (like a crème brulée) made from duck eggs, with tamarillo and a selection of petits fours.

On arrival, we found that we had been sat at a table of eight people; however, it became increasingly apparent as the amuse bouche and then the first course were served that four of the eight weren’t going to put in an appearance. We wondered why – had they looked out the window, seen the rain, and decided not to bother? Had it been booked by some super-rich person who didn’t feel like eating duck tonight? Or had they booked it 6 weeks ago and forgotten about it – at around 9:30 did they suddenly think “weren’t we meant to be doing something tonight?”

Before we started, the maître d’ gave us a short welcome and speech about how the wines had been selected for each course, including the difficulty of matching a wine to a Japanese soup dish.

It was all very tasty and the portions just right – we didn’t feel stuffed as we left, as the only full-sized course was the confit leg (which is understandably difficult to subdivide). A good start to Wellington On A Plate, and there’ll be more to come over the following fortnight.