K1W1 Burger

Wednesday night is now Theatre Night in our new revamped schedule, and we’d booked to go and see Mating In Captivity at BATS Theatre at 6:30. This necessitated a nearby venue for dinner, and also preferably one doing a Burger Wellington. A quick search of the WOAP website using their handy Location filter (something incorporated on my spreadsheets since 2013) allowed me to identify Capitol as being a prime contender, so I booked a table for 5:30 to give us plenty of time.

One of the other competitions which has been running for the past four years during Wellington On A Plate has been the cocktail competition. I haven’t really participated in it to the same extent as the burger competition, but their cocktail was a Native Martini, so I decided to give it a try.

The cocktails in the competition are supposed to be served with a snack or tapa, and in this case it was two nicely crunchy pork scratchings. That’s a piece of honeycomb floating in it, too.

Nicola had decided on the festival menu rather than the burger. She wasn’t that keen on the dessert, so I bravely “volunteered” to eat that for her whilst she chose something else from the main menu. I, however, was firmly in the burger camp, and tried their K1W1 burger, which is described thus: Venison and pāuā party patty, fried egg, beetroot relish and bacon in a wholemeal bun, with chips. The Garage Project beer match was Red Eye Gravy, but they curiously forgot to offer this to me, and by the time I’d finished my martini and the burger arrived, it was too late, so I cannot offer an opinion on it (…yet! I’m hopeful that I will come across it at another venue before the end of the festival). It looked like this:

I squished it all together to eat it, and immediately a large amount of beetroot juice was ejected from the other end of the burger. Fortunately I’d directed this towards the plate, but even so, it was too much liquid to make a stable burger. I chomped manfully away, but eventually it collapsed under the weight of its internal contradictions. The patty was well cooked, although I couldn’t really discern any pāuā flavour within – a subtle flavour like pāuā is going to be overwhelmed by the other ingredients, so I don’t really see the point of its inclusion. The rest of the burger was good, even if I did have to finish it off with knife and fork. The chips were chunky but could have been a tad crunchier. Overall a pretty good burger, and the first “proper” burger I’ve had this time round, so I awarded it an 8.

I finished off with the cheesecake from the festival menu, and very tasty it was too: