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.

Bovine Meets Coastline

And they’re off! Yes, once again Burger Wellington, the burger competition of Wellington On A Plate, has kicked off; this year for a three-week celebration of every way to put one food item in between two bits of bread…or something else, if the fancy takes you.

Over the past few years my forays into Burger Wellington have been fewer as I’ve tended to restrict myself to those available in the local vicinity. However, chance would have it that I have some errands to run in town on the very first day, so I thought I’d take myself to Pravda Café & Grill and avail myself of their offering, called Bovine Meets Coastline.

It’s described on the WOAP website thus:

Beef patty and prawn cutlets, with gruyère, cos lettuce, pickles, thermidor sauce, and Dijon aioli in an Arobake potato bap bun, with steak-cut fries and chipotle mayonnaise.

And it looks like this: 

There’s a Double Vision Brewing beer match as well, which happens to be one of my old favourites, so I had myself a glass of Chillax XPA to wash it down.

So, how was it? As usual the lettuce was surplus to requirements, I’d’ve preferred them to leave it out completely. The two sauces combined with the lettuce meant that this was a burger for eating with a knife and fork – the slipperiness factor was just too much for hands. The three prawns were on a skewer, so had to be removed from that before starting. Otherwise, this was a pretty well-made surf-n-turf burger.

The chips, though...I’d go to Pravda just for the chips. Crispy, crunchy, golden, delicious! With the chipotle (? I couldn’t detect any) mayo, they were fantastic. The beer is a good drop – DVB being our local brewery, I’m familiar with their range. I’ll have to look out to see if there are any special ones just for the festival.

Overall, a strong start, setting the standard for the rest. I’m scoring this 8/10.

 

French Film Festival

We returned to Wellington to find the French Film Festival in full swing. We made our selections from the programme and set about going to see some of them. They’re mostly shown at the smaller cinemas in the city – the three Lighthouses and Penthouse, with some at The Embassy. For some reason our local, the Roxy, doesn’t participate. Anyway, here’s what we saw:

The Stranger (L’Étranger): based on the novel by Albert Camus. I say “based on” (I‘ve never read it), but according to Nicola, it was a pretty faithful transliteration of the novel. Filmed entirely in black and white, it’s the kind of film that wins plaudits and awards in France (it did) and is roundly ignored by the rest of the world. Coming in at over two hours, the length of the film reflects the main character’s ennui and disengagement from the world. By the end, I knew how he felt.

The Musicians (Les Musiciens): A wealthy heiress, Astrid, has tracked down the final instrument of a quartet made by Stradivarius. She already owns the two violins and the viola, and acquires the cello at auction for £10.5 million (plus taxes). She then assembles a quartet of renowned musicians to play a previously-unheard piece which her late father had commissioned from a contemporary composer, specifically to be played when the last instrument was found. Naturally, all the musicians and the composer hate each other, or have unresolved past issues with each other and the piece itself. Astrid attempts to bring all this together with a looming deadline for the one, live, performance and recording of the piece. Quietly comedic in places, it comes to a predictably heartwarming end.

Leave One Day (Partir Un Jour): The winner of TV’s Top Chef has 14 days until her restaurant opens in Paris. She finds out she’s pregnant, and that her father has had a heart attack (his third) so goes to visit her parents in the rural truck-stop town where she grew up. Cue unresolved past boyfriends, family arguments, all the usual “city girl returns to country town” stuff. Inexplicably, everyone bursts into song at regular intervals. Most of the people in it are annoying.

De Gaulle: Tilting Iron (L’Âge De Fer): A big-budget, 2½ hour monstrosity about De Gaulle. And this is only Part 1! It follows De Gaulle’s early career, setbacks and triumphs, his adventures in Africa and difficulties being taken seriously by the British establishment during the Second Word War. The main set-piece is the battle of Bir Hakeim, which, according to the film was “won” exclusively by the Free French (it wasn’t). Simon Russell Beale is typecast as Winston Churchill for the third time in his career – presumably the money’s good. Look out for Part 2 later this year!

A Nun In the City (Doux Jésus): A nun from an enclosed nunnery has her health check-up and incurs a bang to the head, setting off a chain reaction which leads her to abandon the nunnery and go in search of a long-lost love, currently wanted for armed robbery. Along the way she discovers what’s been going on in the outside world for the last 20 years, talks to God, and gets involved in a police raid and a car chase. Yes, it’s a comedy.

Side note: Why change the name of the film? “Sweet Jesus!” is a perfectly good name for a film, and is uttered many times throughout by different characters.

Maigret And The Dead Lover (Maigret Et Le Mort Amoureux): Maigret is one of those subjects which must be approached with hushed reverence, lest you incur the wrath of the French nation. Whilst this has been updated to the 21^st century, very little of it impinges on the plot – there’s one mobile phone (2001 vintage) and a laptop used by a policeman, but the main characters don’t use them; they dress in old clothes, smoke pipes and cigars etc. At the end of the film Maigret comes up with a completely different explanation of events to the official version, but no evidence is offered, nor is his thought process to arrive there shown. Not sure what the point of that is.

The Richest Woman In The World (La Femme La Plus Riche Du Monde): This is a lightly fictionalised telling of the true story, the Bettencourt Affair, involving the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune. The names have been changed (Égoïste magazine becomes “Selfish” magazine), presumably due to lawyers etc. It’s largely about rich people behaving badly. There’s some French politics which extend back to WW2, who said what about Jewish people at the time. Meanwhile, the heiress is making very chaste whoopee with a flamboyant photographer, and spending the kids’ inheritance, much to everyone’s displeasure. According to the blurb it has “several twists too good to spoil”. Spoiler alert: no it doesn’t. It all gets settled out of court, and ends not with a bang but a whimper.

So that’s all the French films for the year. Some of them held my attention for a short while, but there wasn’t anything outstanding that I’d recommend from this year’s selections. One I wanted to see but missed was Redress– maybe it’ll come out on general release later. OK, when does the New Zealand International Film Festival start?