The Belgian

Today’s lunch took me to The Lido Café and Bar. Their Burger Wellington offering is The Belgian, described thusly on the website: Beef and bacon patty with beer, mustard and onion gravy, farmhouse cheese, swede pickle in a wholemeal bun, with hand-cut fries and witloof slaw. The Garage Project beer match was Lola.

It arrived with double-cooked chips, and a salad of mixed leaves and witloof:

Now, from the sound of it, this should be a pretty full burger. But I was unable to detect many of the elements listed above. If there was any bacon in the patty it must’ve been very mild, because I couldn’t taste it. Similarly the farmhouse cheese was distinctly un-farmhousey, and the swede pickle was conspicuous by its absence. There was an onion mixture on top of the patty which I presumed to be the beer, mustard and onion gravy. The wholemeal bun was fine, but substantially larger than the patty within, so whole swathes of the burger were bread but no filling. The salad seemed to be largely comprised of bitter leaves. The best part of the whole dish was probably the chips.

Lola beer is interesting, too. This is a dark German lager (I know!) flavoured with kola nuts and sour cherries. Kola nuts, you’ll know, are what are used to flavour cola drinks. The beer had a hint of cola, but without the sweetness normally associated with such drinks. It may even have tasted of cherry cola, if only I knew what that tasted like. Anyway, not bad, but probably not a beer that I’d choose myself.

Overall I scored this 5. Not the worst this year.