The Mega Omega Burger

What used to be Atlanta Café and Bar has metamorphosed into a second outpost of longstanding Wellington lunchtime food station, Ministry of Food. They’re offering something a bit different this year, and I feel duty-bound to give it a try. Their offering is the Mega Omega Burger, and, as the name might suggest, it contains that ultimate source of Omega 3 oils, salmon. Looking at the description on the Burger Wellington website:

Korean gogi marinated salmon with housemade kimchi slaw and pickled cucumber in a Ministry of Food sesame bun, with handcut fries.

What struck me immediately was they haven’t used the word “patty” in the description. I’ve fallen for this before, particularly with meat sandwiches posing as burgers, but this time, forewarned and thus forearmed, I was expecting an actual salmon fillet rather than a fishcake. The Garage Project beer match was Hakituri, which seems to be the default beer this year – it’s accompanied several of the burgers I’ve tried so far.

And this is how it looked:

As predicted, it’s a salmon fillet in a bun. Gogi is a spicy Korean marinade, containing all the usual suspects of ginger, pepper, onion, soy, spring onions, and gochujang, a Korean fermented chilli sauce. This added a spicy kick to the burger. The burger squashed down to be pick-up-able, but leaked substantial amounts of juice from the fish and the kimchi slaw under the bun. The bun was of a sourdough type of bread, which isn’t particularly absorbent, so couldn’t soak up the juices. Whilst the sourdough maintained its integrity, the salmon fillet didn’t, and parts of it started to fall out of the burger. On the plus side, the fillet was perfectly cooked, not overdone, and the combination with the kimchi and gogi worked well. The skin-on fries were also good. Overall, a valiant effort, but a little more experimentation with how the burger performed under field conditions may have benefitted them. As it is, I’m scoring it a 7.