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Gourmet Burger Kitchen: Home of the upmarket sandwich
With the launch of its new salmon burger, Gourmet Burger Kitchen is really attempting to live up to its name. Aiming to provide a more salubrious experience than its fellow sandwich bars, GBK is always looking to build on its Kiwi ethos of providing interesting ingredients in an attempt to enhance the humble patty and bread combo.
Ingredients such as beetroot, homemade coleslaw, pineapple and pickled onions are the name of the game at GBK with inventive names for the chefs’ creations including The Don and The Taxi Driver (which has a habit of being served to the wrong table). The new salmon burger is a relatively simple affair with only pickles, lettuce and a dill mayo added for flavour. And I have to say it is not bad. Loving meat as much as I do, for a fishy substitute, the salmon burger is probably the best alternative.
However, it was with much glee that I was able to sample a lot of the rest of the menu. For the first round a plain old cheese and beef bacon burger, which was very good in its simplicity and had just the right amount of BBQ sauce. Next up I had a bit of the Camemburger – a gargantuan concoction of burger, Camambert cheese, a hash brown and truffle mayo. While the flavours were not as biting as I would have liked, the hash brown was crunchy and the cheese was a treat. Someone with a more sensitive palate will probably get more of a kick out of it.
The sheer number of sides ordered also beggared belief. Halloumi bites, onion rings, chilli fries, feta sticks and ‘homeslaw’ all washed down with an Oreo milkshake means the fact I am still alive to write this is nothing short of a miracle. For what you can never accuse GBK of is being stingy with its portions. Somehow, much later on, an apple pie and chocolate fondant were consumed before keeling over in a food coma not so intensely felt since Christmas. The apple pie was the winner, by the way.
Overall GBK provides exactly what you’d expect from such an establishment. It’s decent food that will leave you more than full and provides more interesting quirks to its recipes than the competition.
