The Duke

Our best-laid plan on Tuesday was to head to the Beach House And Kiosk. This isn’t normally open on Tuesdays, but it's Wellington On A Plate, right? Surely they’ll be open?

Nope.

Never mind, we headed back through Lyall Bay and stopped at Maranui Café. It was early, surely we’d be able to get a table? Well, a five minute wait is better than last week’s half hour to be seated. Even so, they were doing a roaring trade and warned us that there was already a 20 minute wait on food. But that's OK, we had the crossword with us, we could wait.

We took the opportunity to order drinks straight away. I had the Garage Project matching beer, Kuro – Japanese inspired black lager. I know, right? Nicola ventured into the Cocktail Wellington section and tried the Good Buzz Mojito, made with the usual ingredients plus passionfruit and mango kombucha.

Their Burger Wellington offering is a fried chicken burger, The Duke. It is described thus on the website: Buttermilk fried chicken with smoked Brinza, seared pineapple, crispy bacon, sweet and spicy peppadews and rocket in a brioche bun, with hand cut fennel-salted fries and lemon mayo. It looks like this:

As you can see, there’s a lot going on in here. I pulled the lid off and used a knife and fork straight away – that slice of pineapple had “slippery” written all over it. The chicken coating was nice and crunchy, the bacon good, the rest of the ingredients tasty. This is, in fact, a tasty burger. And look at those chips! They were damn good chips. I mentioned this to our waiter and also when I paid, where the waiter told me that they didn’t normally serve them. I suggested that they might try – cos they’re a hit!

A pretty good burger experience overall, and I scored it an 8.