My dietary Achilles’ heel is the burger’n’chips combo that has been scientifically linked to aortic athersclerosis but, you know, no point dying hungry.
After a busy morning on the river throwing stones at feral goats, I lunched at Blackheath Fish & Chips on the highway in you guessed it Blackheath, a picturesque mountain village 112km from Sydney.
“A burger with the lot and a small chips please! Oh, and a Coke No Sugar ’cause I’m being healthy, right?“
The young blonde who served me was a solid eight with a smile (four-point-five with the RBF) but I wasn’t visiting for the rhododendron festival, so I grabbed my order and returned to my vehicle eager to get stuck in.
I’m always worried when the meal comes in sealed containers, in this case a paper bag. Sixty seconds in that will kill the crunch, so I whipped them out to let them breath and savoured the aroma.
Pretty standard olfactory response with no obvious tang except for that ‘fried food’ thing you get. Not one to trust my nose, I tried the chips (squarecut, perfect salt, could’ve been crunchier) and ate the lot.
Chips 7/10
Then the burger. I don’t give points for plating but have a look at that picture! The cook slapped it sideways into the bag like he was spanking it’s juicy ass.
Boy was it juicy.
But the jaunty angle also let me check the ingredients — handmade beef patty, fried egg, american cheese, token lettuce, sliced tomato, onion, beetroot, pineapple, bacon, barbecue sauce–.
–wait, what? Bacon?? Who puts bacon on a beef burger? It’s sacrilegious!
Burger 7.5/10
Then, with me three bites closer to cardiac arrest, a 1973 Subaru GL wagon slid into the space infront of me and tilted violently as a large woman shoehorned herself out of the driver’s seat.
Maybe it was the orange carbon-neutral Patagonia tshirt that marked me out as a stranger, because Krondak the Destroyer stopped dead in her tracks like a wary buffalo to check me out.
I was like oh pleasepleaseplease don’t wink at me but instead she pursed her disproportionately small lips into a moue of disgust and flounced off into the chip shop.
Disgust?
I checked myself in the mirror and maybe my face did look a little like a crimescene with all that dead animal juice on it, but still. Fuck off Krondak.
Verdict: decent but nothing-special chips; a decadent burger in which all the disparate elements contributed synergistically to the overall gastronomic experience.
Total Score 14.5 /20
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