Macho Nacho

Palmer’s Garden World is an unlikely venue for a burger. I mean, it’s a garden centre, right? But it also has a café called The Chocolate Frog, and they’ve decided to join in the throng with a Burger Wellington offering this year. We had some shopping to do there (tomato and chilli plants for the coming season) so decided to give them a whirl.

When we got there, the carpark was almost full. On a weekday? This did not bode well, and as we entered the café, we could see it was pretty busy. We managed to find a table, though, and I ordered the burger.

Their offering is called Macho Nacho, and it’s described thus: Chile con queso beef patty with guacamole, cos lettuce, tomato salsa and crushed corn chips on a milk bun, topped with a jalapeño popper. It looked like this:

First up, that tasty popper had to come off. It was good, but could have been spicier. Between the buns there was a real estate problem: the burger was way too small for the size of the bun, so there was a lot of bread to get through before you got to the actual patty. The reason for this was clear: the patty is a cheese-stuffed meat burger, so has to be fairly thick and round-shaped. I’m not sure that there’s a solution to this conundrum, as a smaller bun would make the whole burger too unstable. Such deep philosophical questions keep me awake at night. There were nachos inside the bun to add a bit of crunch, and some superfluous lettuce. It wasn’t bad, but not a burger that I’d write home about. I scored it a 5.

Chocolate Frog isn’t a licensed venue so I washed the whole thing down with a HardieBoys dry ginger beer.