Bashing Lashings

McDonalds might have conquered the market for hamburgers and fries, but there is still a place in the world for the corner shop selling good old fashioned burgers. Burgers that drip. Burgers that cannot be eaten one handed. Burgers that are not wrapped in environmentally friendly, biodegradable paper, but instead come in a good old fashioned dolphin killing styrofoam container.

We have two fast food outlets of note in the vicinity - the Best Fish and Chip Shop in the Universe, and Lashings. The fish and chip shop is very good. However, I did not eat there tonight. We tried Lashings instead.

Lashings advertises itself as "gourmet takeaway". That's marketing-speak for expensive hamburgers made with fancy ingredients. For instance, the Cajun burger is a "marinated breast fillet, mayo, rocket, grilled capsicum and Lashings own cajun relish". I have had a few. They are very good. They make the grade as a gourmet burger. They are also man sized. After a Lashings burger and chips, I am ready to waddle home and sleep for a few hours. After a McDonalds meal, I am ready for seconds. Lashings do not skimp on the grub.

Something must have gone wrong in the kitchen tonight, as my Lashings burger was quite dreadful. The Lashings is a burger with the lot - egg, bacon, pineapple, tasty cheese and beetroot. Compared to the other burgers on the roster, it is the most old fashioned. It is the kind of burger that would be familiar to a surfer who pulled over at a caravan by the ocean for a feed after a surf in 1970. It doesn't have fancy weeds like rocket. It doesn't have wog frippery like sun dried tomato and avocado. It doesn't try to get gay with pesto. It's just simple, yet loaded with stuff. If done well, it is immensely filling and satisfying.

It was not. I am not happy, Jan.

A Lashings combo meal will set you back a bit over double what say a Quarter Pounder meal will at Macca's. So it should be over twice as good. Some bits were. For starters, the Coke came in a can, which beats the daylights out of post-mix muck. And it was cold. It had bubbles in it. It did not get watery as it got warm.

That was followed up by an excellent bucket of chips. Chips, not fries. Lashings do not serve prissy little thinly sliced fries. They server reasonably fat chips. Not super fat chips that are a spud cut in half and fried, but chips that I reckon are the right size. They were hot and crispy and sprinkled with chicken salt, which is just magic as far as chips go. They were straight out of the frier too. Top marks to the chipper.

The burger was a disaster. The bun was burnt in several places. I can live with a burnt snag. I like bacon cooked to a crisp. But I detest burnt toast. Bread with carbon on it is just the pits. Eating it is like ingesting one of those BBQ briquette things. Charcoal might be good for the teeth, but it is bad for my tastebuds. Unfortunately, the immolated bun was just the start.

The lettuce was iceberg at its worst. The burger would have been better off if the iceblub had been swapped out with rocket. To hell with tradition. I'll take tasty weeds any day over tasteless iceberg. I don't understand what people see in iceberg lettuce. All I see is a waste of water and fertiliser. It usually has as much flavour as green paper.

The onion - there was supposed to be onion in there somewhere, but I was at a loss to find it. Good strong onion is a must in a burger. Ok, so your breath might stink afterwards, and it may provoke an outburst of farting, but it makes for one tasty burger. The onion was missing in action. A burger without good onion is like a car without petrol - it is a non-starter.

The beef patty - oh God, where to begin. The burgers are supposed to be "fresh 100% pure ground topside beef free of additives and fillers." Yeah - it was free of additives like flavour and moisture and taste. The patty was dry and tough and it kind of reminded me of boarding school. I think it was burnt as well, but it was hard to tell when combined with a burnt bun. To think that a steer gave its life to end up as a patty like that.....

"We hand roll each burger using a few of Lashings own herbs and seasonings". Yep - 'a few' being the operative word. Mr Scrooge must have been adding the herbs and seasonings. A few scrapings of dried things might have made it into the burger, but I couldn't taste them.

I can't say much about the tasty cheese, except that it kind of looked like cheese (yellow and gooey) and bits of it had a taste that reminded me of cheese, but it was not mind blowing tasty cheese.

I think I blew it by asking for BBQ sauce. I should have gone with mayo, but they never offer mayo. They just offer normal tomato sauce or BBQ. Frankly, if the place is selling gourmet food, then I expect gourmet sauces - preferably spicy and homemade. Squeezing in a bit of Fountain BBQ sauce is not a gourmet experience.

Still, I was famished after a hard ride home, and I polished it off like a dog with a fresh liver. All that was left was a bit of vegetable that resembled onion and the odd scrap of greenery that was once a lettuce. Oh, and a puddle of juice in the bottom of my whale throttling styrofoam container.

On the way out, I lashed out $2.95 on a chocolate brownie. It was the best brownie that I have had in years. It was really, really good. If the car had been parked any closer, I would have raided the ashtray for every gold coin and gone back and bought as many slices of brownie as I could afford. So clearly, they can do something right.

Next time, I am going for a modern gourmet burger. I'm leaving the old road trip surfie burgers behind. And I won't forget to leave room for a brownie.

Lashings. Generally great. Occasionally catastrophic. But I guess that's what happens when the food is fresh cooked instead of machine assembled. I can live with that.