Lasagna Topper

Having failed to get into Hideaway on Monday, I thought I’d give it another try. But the door was still shut, and a check on their website shows that they should be open. I think they’ve closed permanently. That’s the problem with a  bar like Hideaway – no-one can find it. It’s tucked so far up a back alley that if you don’t know it’s there, you’re not going to stumble on it. Not a great business model.

So I was again stumped for a lunchtime venue, and decided, as it was such a nice sunny day, to go for a walk down Cuba Street to old fave, Scopa. Their Burger Wellington offering is the Lasagna Topper, described thus:

Aged Wairarapa beef with Kāpiti mozzarella, lettuce, tomato and gherkin sandwiched between two pomodoro lasagna toppers.

  

The Garage Project beer match was Hāpi Daze.

It looks like this:

Lasagna toppers are a thing now, apparently. So is saying "such and such is a thing, now". It's a breadcrumbed, fried slice of lasagna. Unlike a lasagna you might make at home, it needs to be more pasta-heavy and the meat almost dry for this to work. The toppers are used instead of a bun. Being quite carb-heavy, the burger is presented without chips. The tomato sauce inside is an Italian-style sauce, and there’s mozzarella on top of the burger.

This is an interesting experiment in the “how far can you change a burger until it’s no longer a burger” concept. However, I found the actual burger, which should be the star of this meal, quite tough and chewy, which was a bit of a let-down. The toppers were OK, but I wouldn’t choose them ordinarily. Overall, a bit disappointing from Scopa, who are usually up there with the best when it comes to burger competitions – in fact, I seem to recall they produced my favourite burger of the competition in 2014. I scored this a 6.