Café Vue

Burger Reviewed: Blackmore Wagyu beef burger, Andrew’s Choice bacon & house fries

Venue: Café Vue

Date: 9/01/2013

Continuing the momentum of the new year, and proverbially spitting in the face of the oft quoted new years resolution of losing weight, the Burger Friday fellows ventured down to Shannon Bennett’s Café Vue to sample the Wagyu Beef burger for a burger rating.  

Café Vue on New Chancery Lane has become a bit of a Melbourne icon of recent times.  It typifies the Melbourne food scene, i.e. largely hidden down an inconspicuous laneway, serving great food and always busy.

The burger at Café Vue is often talked about in best burger circles. Unfortunately for the fellows, this did not quite reach it today. To be fair, having eaten the burger their multiple times before, it may have been that the summer time chef was on, as this was not as good as the previous burgers devoured. In tv parlance I think it is fair to suggest that it is a non-ratings period at the moment, so chances are that the key chefs might still be on holidays, whilst we get served up Huey’s Kitchen reruns all summer. Not that there is anything wrong with Huey, but it ain’t exactly Masterchef to watch.

Where the burger fell down for mine was in three areas. The patty, the bun and the Burger Friday factor.

Whilst boasting that it was Blackmores Wagyu beef, I was left a little underwhelmed with the patty itself. It was certainly cooked to a lovely and juicy medium. But on the meat scale of rock hard to crumble, it was certainly edging more towards the former rather than the latter. A patty for mine should hold reasonably well together, but have enough crumble for you to know that it is genuinely handmade and not a processed piece of meat. Here I was not so sure. It was getting a little to close to rissole territory for mine.  

The bun was just a little bit to dry and a bit to doughy. Given the patisseries they crank out there, I would expect better from their bakers.

But the biggest missing ingredient for me was the Burger Friday factor. The burger just lacked zing or tang. I was able to compensate for this with a bit of the jam pot of homemade sauce, which I must say was excellent, but would have loved some mustard or a pickle in the burger just to balance out the flavours of the meat and the cheese.

The house chips and homemade sauce were the highlight for mine. 

So all in all, whilst the review does not sound overly complimentary, this is definitively a burger that is well worth trying. It is a good burger and one that you would be happy to part with your hard earned for - unlike the Sri Lankan cricket team. Get around it if in the area. At least to try what the fuss is about.

Given that Café Vue is French, and in light of the upcoming Australian Open, I will dub this burger the Jo Wilfried Tsonga. It looks the goods (scarily similar to Muhammed Ali – the greatest of all time), and performs well, but when it comes to the crunch it just does not quite have the ability to compete with the real heavyweights. A perennial fourth round/quarter finalist, which evidently is where its score ended up.

Burger Friday Score: 38/50