Beef Pattie "Wellington"

After a hard morning’s shopping at Briscoes and Bunnings, we decided to go for a burger lunch at Spruce Goose. Unfortunately, an inordinate number of other people had had the same idea, and there was a queue for a table. This place is massively popular, but as we’ve never been able to get a seat there, I don’t understand why. Yes, it’s handy for the surfers in Lyall Bay, but surely there aren’t that many of them? Anyway, we drove back to Miramar and went to Park Kitchen instead. They, too, were very busy, and they always seem to be completely disorganised when we go there. We took a seat and finally attracted the attention of a wait person. We ordered burgers immediately, as there's no guarantee the wait staff will return.

Their Burger Wellington entry is called Beef Pattie “Wellington”, and it is attempting to be a beef wellington in burger form. It’s described thus:

Randwick Meats premium beef mince patty with smoked beetroot, smoked provolone and bacon and egg aioli in a brioche bun, with chunky fries. The Garage Project beer match is a new one on me, Orange Sunshine.

It looked like this:

You may be forgiven, looking at that picture, for thinking that they’ve forgotten the meat and the bottom half of the bun. This is where the “wellington” part comes into play: what they’ve done, you see, is to make a burger, then completely enclose it (with bacon, cheese, and beetroot) in a brioche dough; and then bake the whole thing into a single, large bun. Clever eh? I bet that’s what they were thinking too.

What’s not so clever, from my point of view, is that this gives you a lot of bread. All the volume of a regular burger that would be taken up by fresh air is now taken up by bready brioche. Yup, the breadiness of this burger was too much, and I ended up cutting it up and eating burger to bun in a correct proportion. Another issue, although one that lessened as time went on, is that it’s served fresh from the oven, and is too hot to pick up comfortably at the beginning. Finally, (I do go on, don’t I?) to be truly a “wellington” the beef needs to be medium rare, and this was well done. So nice idea, but not really a winning burger. I scored it a 6.