The Rice Age 2

Following on from Umami Sunrise, which was last year’s entry onto the Burger Wellington scene by local eatery, The Bento Bar. Not normally noted for burger-style food, this Japanese take-away has been around just over a year – presumably another of the many burgeoning hospo businesses catering to the ever-growing army of film- and game-related workers in this hi-tech hub. 

After bridge on Wednesday we eschewed our usual trip to Seatoun and decided to give this a try. Options for burgers on the peninsula are actually quite limited – The Larder aren’t doing one, Arcimboldi are just putting one of their schnitzels in a bun, and we’ve already tried Café Polo and DVB. However, this looks like an interesting choice.

The Rice Age 2 is described on Burger Wellington like this: Woody's Free Range Farm pork belly, with purple cabbage coleslaw, lettuce, soy-marinated egg, and red pickled ginger in a toasted sticky rice bun. They also say “Last year's rice burger generated real buzz with queues, an RNZ feature, and customers spreading the word. The Rice Age 2 is a playful sequel brought back because people kept asking.”

It looks like this:

It’s a takeaway bar, but they do have a couple of seats inside. Unfortunately we were unable to snaffle those, so we brought the burgers home instead. They’re unlicensed, so no DVB beer match with this one.

The bun is actually toasted sticky rice, and is quite dense. The pulled pork filling was tasty, and the slaw, pickled ginger and soy egg good accompaniments. With the rice there’s no need for chips or any additional carb, so I didn’t feel the lack of chips. My main gripe is with the ratio of filling to rice: there’s rather too much rice. In the attempt to make it more bun-like, the rice “buns” are actually quite thick; maybe making them thinner would have been the way to go? But then there wouldn’t have been much to these burgers, as they’re quite small to begin with. A conundrum to be faced next year, perhaps.

Anyway, it was a pleasant variation on the usual, but not one that I think will take off. I’m scoring it a worthy 6/10.

 

Rumour Has It

Another day with some errands to run in the CBD allowed us to partake of another burger from outside our usual milieu. After completing said errands we repaired to Kākāriki Coffee, which is on the site of the long-gone Trade Kitchen on Customhouse Quay. I’ve not been there because I’m no longer a denizen of this part of town.

Their burger is called Rumour Has It, and it’s described on the Burger Wellington site thus: Percik chicken, with toasted coconut ulam, Mightygreen microherbs, Lot Eight chilli olive oil, Apostle Saint Phillip Hot Sauce, and percik sauce in a curry laksa bun, with fries. The blurb also says “Chef Bobby spent two months in Malaysia tracing the best percik recipe, eating his way as far north as Kelantan, learning from local aunties by watching and talking. The burger is also designed to look like a mouth.”

It looks like this:

with prawn crackers...

or with chips

On the description it says “with fries” but they offered us the option of “with prawn crackers”, so we had one of each. There is no DVB beer match as they don't have a licence.

What is percik? It means “splashing” in Malaysian, and ayam percik is chicken that is basted in the sauce as it cooks. The sauce seems to consist of your generalised East Asian flavourings – ginger, garlic, onions, lemon grass, tamarind, coconut, turmeric, etc. All the recipes I looked at also included chili, but read on…

Firstly, the “burger”: this is a meat sandwich, not a burger. The curry laksa bun is folded over, rather than being in two separate pieces, and had a characteristic curry laksa flavour; it was a bit doughy, I found, but at least it was pick-upable and held its integrity until the end. The chicken inside was well cooked with a spicy crust. The ratio of chicken to bun was about right. The toasted coconut was very much in evidence. There was a salad, some say slaw, which presumably also included the advertised microgreens. The prawn crackers were, I suspect, not cooked in the kitchen, and the fries were pretty standard café fries – although both had what appeared to be a green curry sauce to dip in which wasn’t mentioned on the description.

What was missing, and what I really wanted, was some heat! If they’d used chilli oil and hot sauce it must’ve been in minute quantities. There was no chili in the laksa bun either…so whilst the other spicy flavours were there in abundance, I feel it needed at least a little kick of chilli to really make it zing. This is a burger that had great potential, and with just a couple of tweaks could have been something amazing. As it is, I’m scoring it a competent 6/10.

Edit: I've been corrected on Facebook, they do make their own prawn crackers daily. 

Viva Voce

This morning I took the first Forest Secrets tour at Zealandia. This is a new tour that concentrates on the plant life of Zealandia, its history and unusual features, particularly as they relate to New Zealand. Not my first tour, but the first! Hopefully there will be more to come.

Afterwards I took myself into town for some great reward. I’d been researching on the Burger Wellington site, mainly using as my search criteria “open on Sunday Lunchtime” and “DVB beer match” to find something tasty. I’d narrowed the search down to several in the Cuba Street vicinity, in case my first choice was too busy or said something daft like “we’re not doing that today”.

But they didn’t. I strode into Cuba Street Tavern, demanded a table, and ordered their burger and beer. It’s called Viva Voce – Latin for “by word of mouth”. The burger uses beef tongue and pork cheek - literally from the mouths of the animals. It’s described like this: Crispy pork cheek, with beef tongue bacon, gem lettuce, Thai basil, smoked cheese, kawakawa BBQ sauce, and sriracha in a housemade brioche bun, with Sichuan seasoned shoestring fries.

It looks like this: 

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “eeurgh! Pork cheeks!” and “eeurgh! Beef tongue!” Well, put those preconceptions aside, because this is bloody delicious! The pork is soft and falls apart beautifully – far more so than the pulled pork of other, lesser, pork-based burgers. If they didn’t tell you the bacon was made from beef tongue you wouldn’t know, but you would know that it’s delicious. The barbecue sauce is tasty. The heat comes from the sriracha, which somewhat  overshadowed the kawakawa flavouring. The Thai basil offered a different, distinctive note as well. The whole makes a tasty burger.

Was there any downside? Well, as usual, the inclusion of lettuce left me cold. It lacked pick-upability, so I dived straight in with the cutlery. Personally, I’d’ve left out the sriracha and let the kawakawa and Thai basil do the heavy lifting flavour-wise. The fries were standard shoestring, and had no discernible Sichuan seasoning that I could detect. But these are minor quibbles for what was otherwise an unexpected flavour bomb, and probably the best I’ve had so far. I’m scoring this 9/10.

Bite And Tell

This is a visit to the source…not of burgers, but of the beers that accompany the burgers for Burger Wellington. Yes, they’re all brewed locally (to me) right here in Miramar, and their bar is one of our regular haunts anyway, so off we popped to try their burger.

It’s called Bite And Tell, and it’s described on the WOAP website as such:

Beef patty, with pickled daikon, carrot and sesame coleslaw, cheddar, fresh chilli, fried shallots, and Sichuan sauce in a Shelly Bay Baker brioche bun.

It looks like this: 

And yes, there’s a beer match! It’s Loud And Clear IPA, which I’ve already tried...but as we’re actually in their bar I can get a pint of it, rather than a can, which is what other venues offer. Result!

How was it? Well, they already do a tasty burger, so this is just a variation on their usual patty. But it was a good one: there was the characteristic numbing sensation from the Sichuan sauce, some nice crunchiness from the slaw, a bite from the pickle, and the heat from the chili. The flavours combined rather than fought each other. Other points to note: a pick-upable burger (although the sauce did run all over my fingers), and also the chips at DVB are always quality – crunchy, chunky and golden. Overall I’d eat this burger any time, and I rate this a strong 9/10.

 

Green Eggs And Hamburger

It’s Day Four in the big burger house…

I’d been at Zealandia in the morning doing some training, so headed into town to one of my usual haunts, Burger Liquor, to try their Burger Wellington offering. Burgers are their business, so at least the burger should be good, yes?

Ha! Jokes! Of course the burger was good! Their burger is called Green Eggs And Hamburger, a reference to the book by Dr. Seuss. It’s described on the WOAP website like this: Conscious Valley smashed beef patty, with Supreme Coffee and Woody's Free Range Farm 'red-eye' ham jam, bread and butter pickles, and green peppercorn béarnaise in a Brezelmania potato bun.

It looks like this: 

The DVB beer match was Loud And Clear (DDH Bright IPA) – another WOAP Special. For those of you not up on the lingo, “bright” means “not hazy” (which so many beers, particularly IPAs, are these days), i.e. you can see through it to the other side.

There’s no fries served with this, so I ordered a portion of fat fries to accompany it.

First off, you can always pick a BL burger up, so it passes the first test. The burger is their standard beef burger, with which I am well familiar: nicely smashed, crispy round the edges, fuller in the middle. The green bit is what makes it different, though. I’m afraid the ham jam got somewhat lost in the overall flavour, but the green béarnaise, when it wasn’t dripping down my chin, was delicious – a nice bite of peppercorns to add flavour to the meat. Beef and pepper, of course, is a classic matchup, and yes, it works again here.

The beer is tasty, and can be tasted over and above the burger and sauce. A good combo here. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with this burger. I’m not going to score it mega-highly, though, as it is just a variation on their standard, with nothing really new or different about it. 7/10.

Buck Yeah, Clive!

We’d been playing our usual bridge game on Wednesday but, instead of repairing to our regular post-bridge haunt, Arcimboldi, we decided to head to Café Polo instead. Arcimboldi are doing a burger, much to my surprise, but it turns out it’s just their usual beef schnitzel in a bun, with potato salad instead of fries.

Café Polo are usually pretty reliable. This year’s burger is called Buck Yeah, Clive! Who is Clive? I dunno. It’s a venison patty with beetroot relish, so Nicola asked for one without the relish, if the chef could do this without being driven to suicide by the philistinism of his diners. It’s described on the Burger Wellington website like this:

Venison patty, with beetroot relish, smoked cheese, pickles, and red onion ketchup in a housemade sesame seed milk bun, with skin-on chunky chips.

It looks like this: 

There’s a DVB beer match: Schandalous (Shandy). Shandy? Who drinks that these days? But this is a fairly grown-up one, coming in at 4.4%, with a slight lemonade-y sweetness to it. More a lager top, I’d say. Again, this is one brewed specifically for Burger Wellington, 

Venison can be dry, but they’d avoided that here, and the burger was nice and moist. My main gripe is with the beetroot relish: it totally overpowered everything else in the burger. There was cheese; couldn’t taste it. There were onions; couldn’t taste 'em. There were pickles; yes, I could taste them. So this was a pickle-y, beetrooty flavoured sandwich with some protein added. Could’ve been anything, really. Less is more, people! Less is more!

The fries were café standard, nothing to write home about there. I didn't spot any with the skin still on. This was a pick-up-and-eat burger, and structural integrity held out until the end. The beer match was a waste of time – I might as well have been drinking soda water for all the flavour I could taste after that beetroot. So, my advice is: order it without the beetroot relish…Nicola definitely got the better deal here. You can thank me later. With these failings, I score this a 5/10.

Stout And About

I must be a sucker for punishment. Despite all I’ve said about the Old Bailey’s burgers in the past, here and here, I still decided to try this year’s offering at pub quiz.

Firstly, it isn’t a burger, it’s a meat sandwich…something about which I have railed in the past. Putting a piece of meat between two parts of a bun (phrasing!) doesn’t necessarily make it a burger, OK? On the Burger Wellington website it’s described like this: Stout-braised beef cheek, with Kāpiti aged cheddar, caramelised onion jam, pickles, lettuce, and horseradish cream in a Pōneke Bakery brioche bun, with stout gravy dip and fries.

It looks like this: 

There’s a DVB beer match – Chin-Wag (Fruited Hazy), created specifically for WOAP, so no details available on their website at time of writing. I decided to give it a try. As it says on the tin, it’s hazy, with mango and passionfruit flavours. It actually worked quite well with the richness of the beef.

In the past I’ve complained about them throwing the kitchen sink at their burgers. This year they’ve toned it down – there were only a couple of pickles, and the onion jam was a thin smear inside the top bun. The horseradish sauce had also been diluted so the flavour was recognisable, but not overpowering. The cheese? I didn’t really notice any cheese. The meat was slow-cooked and fell apart easily, and had a good flavour as you’d expect from beef cheeks. The chips were the usual OB chips, and the gravy provided some relief to the dryness (their chips can be a bit dry sometimes).

It's not a pick-upable burger, so had to be tackled with knife and fork. Anything that has a skewer to hold it together generally falls into this category.

Overall, a better effort than in previous years. I’m scoring this 6/10, due to the meat-sandwichness, average chips, lettuce, and unpick-upability.