Tag Archives: Slaw

Meat Review – The Bootlegger Bar

As I mentioned when reviewing the E-I-E-I-O burger, I love a meal where there is more than one meat contained within the dish. And on a recent visit to Katoomba NSW I discovered a restaurant-slash-bar that had on its menu a dish that contained not two meats or three but indeed four!

So lets have a gander at the Bootleggers Meat Share Plate.

A meal made in Trev-heaven!

So the description of the meal is a Share Plate and it is indeed intended for two people. Given it was our anniversary I relented and shared this plate with my wife, but being the kind woman she is she let me devour the lions portion of it.

The meal comes with four meats from two different animals. Beef brisket and links (sausages) and chicken wings as well as fried chicken. Personally I would have preferred the links be made out of pork but you can’t have everything.

Along with the above came enough non-meat foods to ensure that you would have some chance of being able to pass your next bowel movement. Slaw, Corn, Pickles, Potato Salad and Chips. Good to see that at least 40% of the sides were spud based – potatoes being that good that they should almost be considered an honorary meat!

Unto the breach!

The meats were all very tender. The fried chicken was done very well, not remotely oily or greasy like that one would get from a fast food restaurant. The chicken wings were lightly spiced so not as hot as buffalo wings but at least had a bit of bite to them. The brisket was very tender as brisket should be. The only meat that didn’t impress me was the links. They weren’t bad in any way, but just your average beef sausages so were somewhat overshadowed by the rest.

The non-meat stuff was good too. I think. I dunno, I wasn’t really paying attention.

 

Exploding Hot Sauce!

Sauce made by chef Wile. E. Coyote

The waitress brought out two types of hot sauce, espousing their virtues about how they were made on site, not simply store bought. As readers of my blog would know I love hot sauces so was eager to try them out. The red hot sauce was indeed very hot, not as hot as the likes of Mad Dog 357, but still had a helluva kick. The green sauce? Well I went to open it…

…and it exploded!

Perhaps exploded is not the right term. The heat had built up in the bottle so as soon as the top was twisted it made a sound like shook up cola can and the sauce blew forth! It covered my shirt, splattered my face and even left a sorta Trev-shaped splatter pattern on the window behind me.

The poor young waitress was very apologetic. After ascertaining that it had not gone in my eyes she brought multiple wet paper towels for me to clean myself, then later appeared with a shirt from the restaurants merchandise stash for me to wear home. So sadly, unless I had chosen to lick my clothing I never got to sample what the green hot sauce tasted like.

The shirt I wear when doing my radio show, though my music isn’t bootlegged – the CD’s are just really worn

 

Overall

This meal is nearly $80 but its certainly enough for two people (as long as one isn’t me) and its very good tasting. Besides the volatile hot sauces the only other accompaniment was a small bowl of BBQ sauce – personally I would have preferred to get a hearty gravy but perhaps that would push the meal into the realms of making a coronary a certainty. The bar had a different selection of wheat beers on tap which were quite nice, but if you’d take my recommendation skip the ginger based beer, it was pretty average.   So yeah, do yourself a favour and if in Katoomba drop past Bootleggers – you will get a decent feed and maybe a free shirt!

 

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Burger Review #7: Southern Style Chicken Burger

Yea-haw! Fried chicken! Get me some grits, a banjo and a bottle of moonshine and I’m in hog heavan, boy-howdy!

I love fried chicken. But so few places serve it these days because it is so unhealthy. You can get crumbed chicken anywhere, but not it’s fried friend. You can always go to a KFC I guess, but whereas it was my favourite food as a teenager I can’t stand the oily filth that it is has degenerated into over the decades.

So I was pretty chuffed when I took the family out for a relaxing lunch on a surprisingly mild winters day to The Globe Hotel in Rylstone and saw on their lunch menu Southern Style Chicken Burger.

This was a good sized burger with a very big chicken breast inside. And with burgers, like with all facets of life, the bigger the breast the better! This one certainly added to the height of the burger considerably.

There was a bit much slaw on the bottom for my liking but it really wasn’t too much and between it and the crispiness of the chicken it meant this burger had a lot of crunch value.

There was quite a bit of bacon popped in to the burger, and although it was quite fatty it was still pretty nice. There was your requisite tomato and onion, some cheese the menu didn’t mention, but it was the ‘special sauce’ that was the real stand out – for both good and ill – of the condiments.

It was hard to pin down what the special sauce actually was. Something like a sweetened ranch dressing but with a little bit of spice thrown in to give it a kick. While it was really nice and added some much needed moisture to what would otherwise be a dry burger, it was it’s distribution that let it down. On one side of the burger there was hardly any, leaving you wanting more. On the other side of the burger there was way too much, so much so you couldn’t taste anything else. In the middle it was perfect. Obviously whoever made the burger squirted it on top of the chicken without regard for evenness, which really detracted around the outer edges from what was otherwise a damn tasty feed.

So if you find yourself at The Globe and see it on the menu, I heartily recommend you give this burger a try. At $16 it’s not particularly cheap, but given its size and the amount of chips that come with it you will definitely leave full. Just hope they get that sauce distribution right.

 

Related Articles:

Burger Review #6: The E-I-E-I-O Burger

Burger Review #5:  The BAB Burger

Meat Review: Rump & Ribs in Rylstone