Viva Voce

This morning I took the first Forest Secrets tour at Zealandia. This is a new tour that concentrates on the plant life of Zealandia, its history and unusual features, particularly as they relate to New Zealand. Not my first tour, but the first! Hopefully there will be more to come.

Afterwards I took myself into town for some great reward. I’d been researching on the Burger Wellington site, mainly using as my search criteria “open on Sunday Lunchtime” and “DVB beer match” to find something tasty. I’d narrowed the search down to several in the Cuba Street vicinity, in case my first choice was too busy or said something daft like “we’re not doing that today”.

But they didn’t. I strode into Cuba Street Tavern, demanded a table, and ordered their burger and beer. It’s called Viva Voce – Latin for “by word of mouth”. The burger uses beef tongue and pork cheek - literally from the mouths of the animals. It’s described like this: Crispy pork cheek, with beef tongue bacon, gem lettuce, Thai basil, smoked cheese, kawakawa BBQ sauce, and sriracha in a housemade brioche bun, with Sichuan seasoned shoestring fries.

It looks like this: 

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “eeurgh! Pork cheeks!” and “eeurgh! Beef tongue!” Well, put those preconceptions aside, because this is bloody delicious! The pork is soft and falls apart beautifully – far more so than the pulled pork of other, lesser, pork-based burgers. If they didn’t tell you the bacon was made from beef tongue you wouldn’t know, but you would know that it’s delicious. The barbecue sauce is tasty. The heat comes from the sriracha, which somewhat  overshadowed the kawakawa flavouring. The Thai basil offered a different, distinctive note as well. The whole makes a tasty burger.

Was there any downside? Well, as usual, the inclusion of lettuce left me cold. It lacked pick-upability, so I dived straight in with the cutlery. Personally, I’d’ve left out the sriracha and let the kawakawa and Thai basil do the heavy lifting flavour-wise. The fries were standard shoestring, and had no discernible Sichuan seasoning that I could detect. But these are minor quibbles for what was otherwise an unexpected flavour bomb, and probably the best I’ve had so far. I’m scoring this 9/10.