Pho-Chick Sakes

What’s this? Another burger post? But Burger Wellington finished on Sunday! How can this be?

Well, some establishments are continuing to offer their burger to the end of August, or until stocks run out. Also, the five finalists in the competition are continuing with their burgers, before the final reckoning of best burger on…wait…today!

Before I get into that, however, a round-up of some misses. On Sunday, the last official day of the competition, I wanted to go to One80 to try Porteña!. No joy, however, because I couldn’t find a park on Oriental Parade, and I was under a little bit of time pressure. Ah well.

On the WOAP site page there’s a handy list of places still doing burgers, so I checked that, and today we went to Lazy Juan’s to try Marites; but Juan was feeling too lazy to cook. Possibly because he’s a finalist and is busy at the cook-off, but it wasn’t available. Nul points. We went down Dixon Street to try another well-favoured burger at The Old Quarter – Squeal The Deal – but there was a fifteen minute wait for a table…clearly it’s still very popular! Over the road, Pho Viet was enticingly half-empty, so we crossed and sat ourselves down there. I ordered the Pho-Chick Sakes burger, while Nicola had a duck pancake of monstrous proportions.

It's described on the Burger Wellington website like this: Buttermilk fried chicken thigh, with American cheese, South Asian pickled vegetables, Manuka honey-glazed bacon, iceberg lettuce, and smoked sesame yum yum sauce in a Volco coconut-infused milk brioche bun, with Thai fry seasoned chips and phở broth.

It looks like this: 

There’s no DVB beer match so I ordered a Tuatara Hazy Pale Ale to accompany it.

Straight away you can see you’re not eating this with your hands. Before I tucked in with the cutlery, I had a taste of the broth, which is a good, flavoursome accompaniment. The fries were well-cooked and well-seasoned. The burger was impressive! Lots of flavour, good crunch on the chicken, I didn’t mind the lettuce so much as I was pulling the burger apart anyway. The sauce had quite a kick to it – sweet and spicy. I didn’t notice any coconut in the bun, largely because I wasn’t looking for it, and the slice of cheese was only a few molecules thick, and could have been more generous. But all that aside, this was a tasty burger, and a good way to finish (? Who knows?) the competition. I’m scoring it 8/10, even though voting has closed and it won’t count for anything.