Burger Fuel, Ponsonby

At the risk of sounding too much like an armchair critic, which of course I suppose I am, it's always seemed weird to me how difficult it seems to be to get something as simple as a burger right. When it comes to more challenging culinary tasks, I can understand how years of training and no small amount of natural ability are prerequisites - turning out a hundred perfect individual Boeuf en Croute every night, for example, or perhaps deftly spinning caramelised sugar into stunning shapes, nets and shards to decorate desserts.

Burgers, though: not hard. Bun. Burger (what New Zealanders call a 'patty'). Limited salad. Relish. Mustard. Additional garnishes: cheese, mushroom, bacon, pickles and yes, over here you may also include fried eggs and beetroot. The basics, though, are pretty simple.

Burger Fuel fail on every single point. Let's go through them one by one, as the crushing disappointment I experienced here needs to be outlined in full.

The Bun
The only word to do this justice is 'strange'. Strange that anyone would see this bun as fit for consumption, let alone suitable for housing a burger. Dry, oddly flat, brown (brown bread for burgers? WTF??), with an unusual earthy, cardboardy flavour. Horrible.

The Burger (or 'Patty', if you prefer)
Extraordinarily wide and weirdly thin, about 3-4mm at its thickest. Low-grade meat, cooked until grey. Did they boil this first?? Any flavour it might have once had has long since departed.

Sauces
Thin smear of ketchup, massive dollop of sweet, cloying, luminous yellow mustard, which turns out to be the dominant flavour of the whole affair. Took days to get the smell off my fingers.

Pickles
Gherkins x 2 slices. Actually not that bad, but rather than lifting the overall experience, served to highlight how appalling the rest of it was.

Decent chips failed to improve the mood. As for the decor, it's a bit like being in a (real) car mechanic's shop, all the fake 50s retro schtick having dated badly and in sore need of a rework. Failing that, a quick wipe with a damp cloth wouldn't go amiss. Large windows opening onto the street let in legions of flies, along with pigeons and exhaust fumes, through which you can disconsolately peer, wishing fervently that you were anywhere but here.

Quite simply, the most awful place I've eaten in since being in New Zealand. And that includes Wendy's.