Hop'd To It

Tonight we’re off to see A Doll’s House at Circa Theatre, so I thought I’d mix up my burger-eating a bit and go for a pre-theatre burger. If you look at the WOAP website, you’ll see that you can select your burger protein from a drop-down list. This year there are several burgers categorised as “not your usual”, a catch-all category for those establishments experimenting with an unusual patty protein. Amongst those is München, who are offering a rabbit burger called Hop’d to it burger. Other contenders in this category include alpaca, buffalo, and goat.

München occupies the space formerly known as Chicago Sports Bar, on the waterfront. I’ve been there for beer (once) but haven’t dined there, so it meets my criteria for this year of going to new places. It’s part of the ever-expanding Wellington Hospitality Group of pubs who seems to be taking over the city.

The burger is described on the WOAP website like this: Braised rabbit patty with fennel, radish, cos, Tiamana wheat bier dressing, crispy onions and plum chutney in a Brezelmania rye bun with root vegetable crisps. It looks like this:

The Garage Project beer match is – at last! Something different! – Garagista. This is a brew that’s been around for a number of years and is a staple of the brewery.

A note on the Garage Project beer match: each year, they brew a number of new beers to be matched with the burgers. This year they’ve made three, although they have done more in the past. It’s not compulsory to match your burger to one of their beers, but a lot of places do, as they strive to win the overall competition. Some places match their burger to an existing Garage Project beer, as is the case with München. I’ve yet to try either of the other two festival beers, but hope they’ll be matched with a burger I try later in the festival.

How was this bunny burger? First thing to note is that the meat is not formed into a patty, even though  it says so in the description, so it's a pulled meat sandwich rather than a burger. The meat itself was a bit dry, and I only discovered the plum chutney as I bit into the final mouthfuls of the sandwich. It was tasty when I got to it, but there needed to be more...as Manu Fieldel would say, "Where's the sauce?" If there was a wheat bier dressing it was very well disguised...I could taste no hint of it on the slaw. The whole thing was somewhat bland and needed a bit more flavour. The root vegetable crisps were a selection of potato, kumara, carrot and parsnip, and were nice and crispy. Bun integrity was also good - helped, I suspect, by the overall dryness. Too much liquid is the enemy of buns!

Overall an interesting adventure,  but I feel that with a few tweaks they could have made something far better. I scored it a 6.