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Disclosure: Chompchomp was invited to dine as a guest of Grill’d Vic Park.

 

I moved into the Vic Park area nearly twenty years ago when I was a young, whipper-snapper uni student. As is often the case when living in shared housing, I never really stayed in one location for long.  I dotted about the neighbourhood in a number of houses until the Boy and I finally settled down and bought our own home. Over the years, it has been exciting watching my suburb’s growth and development and it has become a place that its residents are now fiercely proud of. One of the best things that I love about Vic Park are our many options for dining out. We are totally spoilt for choice with literally the A to Z of international cuisine on our doorstep in addition to some modern wine bars and pubs. One of the recent newcomers to the café strip is Grill’d Victoria Park burger bar.

Grill’d burgers have been around since 2004 and have grown from humble beginnings of a single Hawthorn store in Victoria to now being found across Australia in over 50 stores. To help promote their new Vic Park store, I was kindly invited to come and enjoy a round of burgers on the house. This was the first time I had visited a burger bar with the Boy since his conversion to a plant based diet and I was curious to see his opinion on their vegetarian burgers. He is a hard man to please when it comes to burgers and is surprisingly critical. If he liked their burgers, I figure they must be good.

After nearly half an hour wait we still hadn’t received our meals and I enquired with one of the friendly wait staff. Within seconds she returned to our table blushing red with embarrassment and apologetically explained that for some reason our order got lost in the computer system. Her apology was promptly followed by the manager zooming to our table to do the same.

Within minutes our burgers and chips arrived along with further apologies. The Boy ordered the “Garden Goodness” on a regular bun. This burger contained a thick, soft veggie patty with beetroot, tasty cheese, avocado, salad, relish and finished with herbed mayo.

Impressing somebody who has been eating meat their whole life with a meatless vegetarian burger was always going to be a challenge. The Boy stopped eating meat for environmental, health and animal welfare reasons, not because he didn’t like the taste! I knew that this was going to be the testing moment and within seconds of taking his first bite I could see this was a winner. Packed full of flavour but without attaining an obscene height; the Garden Goodness is a veggie burger for even the most seasoned meat eater.

I had been feeling a little low on my iron levels recently and craved a real beef burger. Also being in the mood for a bit of spice I tried the “Hot” mama which contained a grilled grass fed lean beef patty, roasted peppers, dill pickle, tasty cheese, tzatziki, salad and a kick of Harissa paste. Of course I chose mine with the gluten free bun option.

Now those of you dear readers who are like me and cannot tolerate gluten in their diets, you will empathise the plethora of terrible gluten free bread out there. It has the tendency to have the texture of cake and often crumbles to pieces under the strain of weight and juices from a good burger.

While many gluten free buns disintegrate to mush at the half way mark or even sooner, I found that Grilld’s gluten free buns held good shape despite my burger having an abundance of sauce and juiciness. It remained so “normal” that I became doubtful that it was genuinely gluten free bread. I called our waitress over to that table double check that they hadn’t made another mistake only to sheepishly find I was totally wrong, it was definitely gluten free. A little embarrassing!

Finally, Grill’d hot chips deserve a mention. These thick cut chips are sprinkled with a very addictive herb mix that makes you feel like you are eating at somewhere a bit more upmarket than just your local burger joint. The chips were piping hot, crunched loudly yet were fluffy and soft on the inside. This could be dangerous being so close to my front door.

To ensure to myself that our order stuff up was just a once off teething issue, the Boy and I returned on a couple of occasions incognito without my glaringly obvious SLR camera in hand and found there to be no further delays or issues with our orders. We have found both their burgers and salads consistently enjoyable and will continue to return.

Grill’d Victoria Park

895 Albany Highway, East Victoria Park WA 6101 | (08) 9355 1000 | www.grilld.com.au 

 

Chompchomp dined as a guest of Grill’d Vic Park. As it is too hard to be 100% subjective with a complementary meal I will refrain from giving a review or score and will purely just document my experience.