Nawabi Galouti

And they’re off! Yes, it’s time for Burger Wellington 2024, as part of Wellington On A Plate. As Elle, the big cheese of The Big Foody tours company, was coming down to Wellington, we decided to go to One80 Restaurant and try their burger. It was already on my shortlist, and many Wellington eateries are unfortunately not open on a Tuesday lunchtime, so my hand was somewhat forced. No matter...we headed up to the 7^th floor, and took a table with commanding views over Oriental Bay and Wellington Harbour, on a gloriously sunny day.

One80 restaurant in the Copthorne Hotel has a very good reputation for a hotel restaurant. Executive chef Chetan Pangam has been there for a number of years now, and delivers an Indian/French inspired menu. Last year, he won Burger Wellington with Goan Chicken Ros Pao. This year, they’re offering a lamb burger, Nawabi Galouti. It’s described on the WOAP website thus: 

Galouti lamb patty, pulled lamb shoulder filo cigar, lamb snow, ghee, coriander, Zany Zeus mint labneh, and chicory in a Clareville Bakery croissant bun, with gunpowder podi fries. The Garage Project beer match is Susegad – a hazy wheat beer flavoured with kokum. 

It looked like this: 

Chef Chetan was on hand to give us the background to the burger; Galouti is a lamb dish that was created in the 19^th century for Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. He had no teeth so couldn’t chew a traditional lamb dish, so his chefs invented a dish that was so tender that he could manage to eat it without the benefit of teeth. Accompanying the burger was gunpowder podi fries.

One of the benefits of winning the competition is that you can then work with Garage Project to design a beer to go with your next year’s entry, and that’s exactly what we’re drinking. Susegad is the Portuguese word for calm, and the essence of the beer is to complement and calm the spices in the burger. We were advised to try the beer with a squeeze of lemon juice in it, as this alters the flavour and helps the beer cut through the fattiness of the burger.

How was it all? It’s not a perfect burger. To start, the cigar was delicious – nice crisp filo, and tender meat inside. The croissant bun was quite dense, presumably in order to maintain its integrity, so I tackled this burger with a knife and fork rather than hands. The galouti lamb patty is ground very fine, as required by the Nawab…but here could have been left with a slightly coarser grind, to retain a bit of texture to the meat. We do, after all, have teeth. The lamb snow was made from the rendered fat from the pulled shoulder. The fries were crisp and flavoursome, and the spice in the patty, whilst subtle, gradually crept up on you. Overall, a well-flavoured start to this year’s burger journey with a good beer accompaniment. I scored it 7/10.