The Friar Tuck

Today’s adventure took me to a venue up Cuba Street, Olive. This is a small café mainly catering for the hipsters, vegetarians and soy-latte drinkers that litter Cuba Street, but their Burger Wellington offering for this year is heavily meat-based. One of their USPs is a garden bar out the back, which substantially increases its capacity. Given the popularity of the place, it was full on a Wednesday lunchtime, but they were able to seat me in the garden. It’s under cover and they have heaters, so it was OK. Wouldn’t want to be out there if it was windy or rainy, which fortunately it wasn’t. The waitress told me there was a bit of a wait on food, so I ordered my burger and Garage Project beer match (Hakituri. Again.) to get it straight into the kitchen, then settled down and waited.

And waited. What the waitress hadn’t said was “there’s a wait on your beer as well”. I don’t know what the problem was*, but I collared another wait staff and he brought the beer pronto.

The FriarTuck Burger is described like this:

Randwick Meats housemade beef patty with Zany Zeus smoked brinza, Haewai Meadery honey mead and plum ketchup, and Scotty’s Meats bacon in an Arobake pain de mie bun, with pork crackling.

The burger, when it arrived, looked like this:

“That’s a pretty tasty-looking burger”, I hear you say, and you’d be right. All the components were there, and it was well-proportioned. The bacon was crispy, the bun was toasted, and the patty cooked medium rare. Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted the bane of my burgering life – extraneous foliage sticking out from the bottom of the patty – but I was able to contain this fairly well. One of the many issues I have with putting lettuce in a  burger is the unintended additional wetness it brings, as the leaves are rarely dried after washing. This water combines with the juices from the burger and condiments, and spills out onto your plate, and clothes if you’re unlucky. But that aside, my only other cavil (it’s a great word, cavil) is the lack of deep-fried thinly-cut potatoes. Yes, there’s a curl of crackling accompanying the burger, but I need chips as well. But for this, we would have been into 10 territory. As it is, it scores a 9.

* But I guess she forgot.