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?