As my first taste of Burg­er Welling­ton, I decid­ed to check out The Green­man because I had errands in the area, and their offer­ing sound­ed quite deli­cious:

Whiskey and Maple Lamb Burg­er
Local lamb pat­ty with let­tuce, toma­to and pineap­ple sal­sa on a shawar­ma bun, served with fries
$20 | Avail­able: Lunch and din­ner

Sounds good, right? So I decid­ed to go and eat it. And I mean eat it, none of this bull­shit “oh I’ll only have half the bun and three fries max­i­mum and I’d rather just have a bite of some­one else’s” crap.

So there are some things you need to know about this burg­er:

  1. There is no taste of whiskey in it. There is the faintest hint of maple-flavoured syrup, which I sus­pect has just been brushed the pat­ty, which brings us to point two:
  2. It is not a home­made pat­ty. It was too thin, and the tex­ture was sus­pect. There were fillers in that there lamb.
  3. There’s unad­ver­tised bacon in the burg­er (which is good if you like it, not good if it offends you) and also unad­ver­tised canned beet­root. Not cool.
  4. There is also unad­ver­tised “cheese” in the burg­er. I’m using quo­ta­tion marks, because it was a square of processed, unmelt­ed ick.
  5. The shawar­ma bun has seen fresh­er days. I don’t think it has ever seen a shawarm though, but it has prob­a­bly had recent res­i­dence in New World under the label “bap”.
  6. When it says “pineap­ple sal­sa”, read that as “some pieces of canned pineap­ple”. Don’t imag­ine there will be onions, chilis or corian­der, all of which would have gone a long way to mak­ing this burg­er more excit­ing.

Oth­er than that, the staff were friend­ly, the space was nice enough although the flags are pret­ty butt ugly, and although there are no mag­a­zines, you might be able to find a Dom Post to read if you’re din­ing alone. I was think­ing this burg­er was a 3/5, but giv­en that it was $20 and my list of com­plaints with it, I’d say it’s more a 2.5 / 5. It’d be fine if you were real­ly hun­gry and drink­ing, but as a com­pe­ti­tion entry, it does not past muster.

The Green­man is also offer­ing up a $25 lunch for Welling­ton on a Plate, but it’s just items pulled off its reg­u­lar menu that sound unin­spir­ing and bad­ly bal­anced — bread & dips with a bready sand­wich or piz­za, any­one?