WOAP ’16: a burger, a stew and a beer

The mad rush of eat­ing con­tin­ues, so with­out any fur­ther ado, let’s get into it.

The Steakholder at Portlander

You know by now how we feel about the Port­lander, so of course this was going to be on my wish­list.

“Medi­um rare rib eye with Scotty’s Meats dou­ble smoked bacon, fried egg, onions, melt­ed Te Horo Swiss cheese, shoe­string fries, seed mus­tard and Huffman’s Hot Sauce in an Arobake bun, with frick­les and agria pota­to skins.”

Oh fuck yes this was good. Nor­mal­ly I’d like my steak rar­er, but it makes sense in a burg­er for it to be medi­um rare so it’s not as chewy. I should also point out that I asked for mine with­out the egg, because eggs are gross, but I can imag­ine if you were a per­son who likes eggs, this would be good. There was the right amount of mus­tard and a lit­tle spice from the hot sauce, and oh Lorde, that bacon, it was dreamy. Full dis­clo­sure: half way through the burg­er we found out that they were on the house because. This did not affect my review because hon­est­ly, I think that pic­ture speaks for itself. It is a shame though that Port­lander is a DB bar and there­fore not allowed to serve a match­ing Garage Project beer, because I think the Lola would have been a bet­ter match than the inhouse beer they sug­gest­ed.

If you like steak burg­ers (or if “steak” burg­ers that are tough, chewy and 5mm thick have made you shy away from the con­cept but you’d like to trust a restau­rant spe­cial­is­ing in steak to get it right), please do remem­ber to make a book­ing, because the Port­lander is, as always dur­ing WOAP, over­flow­ing.

The Old Bailey

Today my col­leagues booked in to eat the burg­er at the Old Bai­ley, and since I’m aller­gic to crab, I tagged along to try their Fes­ti­val Dish. You may have seen on Twit­ter that the Welling­ton on a Plate web­site lists their dish for $15, but the menus in house have it at $25. I’m real­ly glad that after I point­ed this out to the staff, they only charged me $15, because hon­est­ly, there is no way that Dark and Hot Caribbean Stew is worth $25, even with a glass of wine. The three meats were slow cooked but dry, and indis­tin­guish­able from each oth­er. There was­n’t real­ly any fire to the dish, more just an over­whelm­ing inten­si­ty like soy sauce. The cas­sa­va & coconut bread was actu­al­ly real­ly nice, but did noth­ing to to fresh­en the dish up. I did­n’t take a pho­to of it, but you know what a plate of stew looks like, right? Instead, here’s a pho­to of the crab burg­ers.

Appar­ent­ly the buns weren’t very fresh and the crab not too promi­nent, though there was a good zing of lemon. Lit­tle things like hav­ing to ask for a spoon when you’re served a bowl of sauce and the fact that you actu­al­ly can’t get your legs under the table unless you’re very very short also made the expe­ri­ence not great. Though my col­leagues are of course love­ly and delight­ful com­pa­ny. Again, the bar is DB owned, so there was no Garage Project match.

That’s okay though, because wait­ing for me at home in my fridge was…

Lola, the cola beer

This is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Garage Project and the good peo­ple at Kar­ma Cola

“Brewed with cit­rus, spices, whole sour cher­ries and Kar­ma Cola cola nuts, Lola’s got quite a tangy cher­ry flavour with a kick of cola at the end.”

Some googling shows me this has been made before in small batch­es in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Six Bar­rel Soda, but now it’s in cans, and more wide­ly avail­able dur­ing Welling­ton on a Plate at Drag­on­fly, Five Bor­oughs, Hill­side Kitchen, LBQ, Logan Brown, Mon­terey, One Fat Bird, One80 Restau­rant & Bar, The Lido, The Larder and The Library. More impor­tant­ly, 20 cents from the sale of each can goes to the Kar­ma Cola Foun­da­tion, whose good work we talked about along­side of beers before here. 

I was deliv­ered two of these beau­ties to try and I loved it. I’ve found a lot of beers that have strange ingre­di­ents in them don’t taste like that at all, but this was the per­fect blend of beer and cola, with­out seem­ing at all like the dregs of every­one’s glass­es mixed togeth­er — though it isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly cher­ryesque. Like Kar­ma Cola it’s not over­ly sweet, and it’s got spices in the mix, and like beer it’s got alco­hol too. It’s well worth try­ing. Plus it looks just like cola in a glass if you need to hide your drink­ing…

This beer is obvi­ous­ly inspired by the (prob­lem­at­ic) song from the Kinks so I’m a lit­tle iffy with the tagline on the can “Things are not always what they seem; Lola, a cher­ry cola dunkel, a bound­ary-bend­ing trans-style take on the clas­sic ger­man dark lager” because it seems to me like cis peo­ple coopt­ing trans peo­ple for prof­it. But it is a deli­cious beer, mon­ey is going to a good cause, and it will go very well with burg­ers.  So I’ll drink it as a trib­ute to the most famous cat in Welling­ton instead.