The Dave

We were looking for a burger in the local area, and decided that Café Polo was a likely candidate. Their standard burgers are good anyway, so their Burger Wellington offering must be worth a try?

It’s called The Dave. I don’t know who Dave is*. It’s described thus on the website: Harrington's pork, beef and sage sausage meatloaf patty, with a crispy Zany Zeus ricotta and potato fritter, caramelised onion, and green pea salsa, in a housemade milk bun with chunky chips and beef gravy. It looks like this:

The Garage Project beer match was again The Devil’s Lettuce, which is a tasty drop. It still hasn't made it onto GP's website so whether it will be continued after Burger Wellington remains to be seen.

Basically, what we have here is a sausage burger, and a tasty one. Caramelised onion – tick. Green pea salsa was more like mushy peas. Just as an aside here, New Zealanders can’t do mushy peas; they use garden peas instead of marrowfat, which doesn’t work, the texture’s all wrong. The chunky chips were good, and the gravy, served on the side, was delicious – chips and gravy is a rare delicacy! You can tell there’s a “but” coming, though, can’t you? Yes, indeed: it’s the ricotta and potato fritter. It may have been crispy at some stage in its life, but it wasn’t by the time it reached the table. So what you had was a layer of mashed potato on top of the patty. Ricotta isn’t a strongly-flavoured cheese, and diluted with mashed potato it was barely discernible. All this did was add an unnecessary layer of carbs, which unbalanced the whole burger. Overall, I scored this a 7/10.

* The vegetarian option is called The Chas. Mystery solved!