During the past six months, I have eaten weekly with this city's best chefs. They have fed me dishes such as: poached leeks, Spanish ham and fresh goat's cheese with brown butter vinaigrette; warm salad of sweetbreads with spring vegetables, crushed peas and yogurt; pork fillet with freekeh and slow-roasted baby carrots; and on and on. After so long on this trail of gourmet wonder, I had reached the point where what I felt like most was a burger, absolutely desecrated with cheese.
This is not to say I wanted to slum it. If I've learned anything from the previous six months of eating high on the hog - and learning has never been the point - it's that good food does not happen without great care. I wanted a burger that had been conceived by a genius and created by an artisan. I wanted something that might reasonably be called a hipster burger.
I sought and desired that level of pretension because I knew that pretension is the surest indication of an attempt at creating meaning, and that food is the purest form of meaning.
To expand on this, or possibly to say something completely unrelated, I wanted a burger that would make me the happiest person in Auckland. Everybody knows that the place to get such a burger is Burger Burger, a place whose name is so search engine-optimised for success in their field that they could probably serve pizza and still be Auckland's number one burger place.
