The Buffalo

And they’re off! Yes, the Burger Wellington section of Wellington On A Plate is back, and, with all the speed of a snail on valium, we’ve dived into the party, four days late. Why so sluggish? Well, not being employed in the CBD these days means we don’t have a lot of eateries on our doorstep for lunchtime burgeration, so we waited until this week, and the offering from The Larder…which is closed on Mondays. On Tuesday, therefore, we headed down the hill at midday, to find the place chock-a-block with customers. The Larder are also running their Vietnamese Larder offering throughout August, so there’s other Vietnamese delicacies on offer. We put ourselves on the wait list for a table, and settled down with the crossword. After about 15 minutes we were seated and ordering burgers.

The Larder’s offering this year is The Buffalo, described thus: Grilled water buffalo patty with Vietnamese mint, pickled vegetables, roasted rice powder and lucky sauce in a housemade bun, with fried rice paper crisps and nuoc cham mayonnaise. The Garage Project beer match is Transit of Venus, a hazy IPA made with lemongrass, lime and grapefruit. I’d ordered a side of chunky chips to accompany, so the whole shebang looks like this:

This is a tasty burger. Can you tell that it’s buffalo and not beef? I don’t know…maybe the meat is a little stronger in flavour. The Vietnamese mint gives a tangy flavour to the burger, and the pickled vegetables are good too. I didn’t use the mayo, as I had aioli with my chips anyway. Also, the rice powder didn’t really add much other than to make eating it a bit messy. The beer is, of course, up to the usual high standard you expect from Garage Project – tangy and hazy and IPA-ey.

Overall, a good burger to start our Burger Wellington adventure. I score it a 7/10.

Now for the bad news…