Sterling Burger

I had a plan to go and warm myself up on this cold and drizzly Wellington lunchtime with the Hot Blooded Burger from The Hideaway. But, like those of mice and men, my plan went aglay. The Hideaway, it transpires, is not open on Mondays. Fortunately I’d been perusing my burger list shortly before setting out, and had noted down another nearby venue for a possible visit before the week was out, so I promoted that to the top of my list, and headed up The Terrace to new bar, Sterling.

Sterling is the latest incarnation of the site at 101 The Terrace, formerly home to The Pub, a somewhat down-at-heel boozer. I visited it several years ago – we even quizzed there for a short while – but I was generally unimpressed by it. The new bar has tidied the place up and generally moved upmarket. Their burger offering is the imaginatively-named Sterling Burger.

It’s described on the Burger Wellington website like so:

Awatoru venison burger with beetroot relish, housesmoked cheese, juniper pickled celeriac and Sterling secret sauce, with truffled shoestrings.

They’re not participating in the Garage Project beer match, so I selected a Hop Federation red IPA.

It looked like this:

I think you’ll agree, it looks pretty tasty. And by golly, it is! The housesmoked cheese was both cheesy and smoky. The celeriac and secret sauce was a kind of slaw, but they’d not made the schoolboy error of overloading the burger with it; it didn’t overpower, nor make the burger too wet. The bun was a fairly standard bread bun, but with the absorbency to soak up the beetroot and slaw, so the whole think was manageable, and burger integrity was 100% to the end. The shoestring fries were good, although evidence of truffling would require a finer palate than mine. My only minor cavil is the thickness of the patty: it was a bit on the mean side, and a couple more millimetres of thickness could have made this a perfect burger. As it is, I’m awarding it 9.