It’s a very bold claim, but this country-comfort burger is a tower of fresh taste where each bite is underlined by a different ingredient.
We don’t celebrate the works burger enough. Beetroot-stained roll. Pre-sliced “tasty” cheese. Shredded iceberg. Pineapple. Egg. Your choice of sauce. Although there’s no clear consensus as to how or why the burger came about (although a surplus of tinned goods created by the opening of Edgell and Golden Circle canneries in the 1940s might have had something to do with it), its unknown creator is up there with Peter Russell-Clarke and Grandma Poss in terms of their influence on everyday Australian food.
I’m quite serious about this – the “Aussie” burger is one of the few culinary creations we can claim as legitimately unique. Try finding beetroot, pineapple and barbecue sauce between bread on any other continent. I bring all this up because I may have found the best works burger in Australia.
I say “may” because it’s an impossible claim to confirm without visiting every fish and chip shop that once sold a Sunnyboy. Who knows what takeaway lurks near Beechworth or Kalgoorlie or the industrial sheds of Croydon Park? (I’m also conscious of Paul’s Famous Hamburgers and its faithful in Sylvania.) But gee, Wingello Village Store and Post Office knows its way around a spatula.
According to David Bruggeman, who runs the one-stop Southern Highlands shop with his family, the general store’s dates back to 1865. Wingello is home to about 600 people, and Bruggeman and his wife Lana took over its only shop 16 years ago, extending the mail, newspaper and basic grocery services to include a cafe with “simply good food”. “You won’t find avocado or Turkish bread or any of that stuff here,” he tells me.
You will, however, find a formidable selection of milk bottles, caramel buds and chocolate freckles along the counter, and a menu heavy with truck-stop classics plus a whipped cream-topped sundae. If the indoor fire is going, marshmallow roasting is encouraged. I suspect the BLT is a paragon of the form, and the cinnamon toast is a super-duper breakfast, but the $18 works burger is the headline act.
The soft, flat bun comes from Bryant’s Bakery in Goulburn. Local butchers supply the beef and house-cured bacon. Lettuce, tomato and free-range eggs come from nearby farmers; the pineapple and beetroot comes from a can. Sauce is from a bottle, unless you ask for the house-made mayonnaise, but that’s better saved for chips. Tomato sauce on an Aussie burger, forever and ever, amen. (The only good thing about ETA Original Barbecue is the bottle design. Yes, yes, I’ll begin the process of revoking my citizenship now.)
Anyway, all this adds up to a tower of fresh flavour where each bite is underlined by a different ingredient. The bacon is generous. The onions, translucent but not browned. It may take a few bites until you hit pineapple. The 130-gram patty is lean on fat, which some burger purists will hate, but I don’t mind finishing the thing and still feeling human. The perfect trinity of salty, sweet and lightly pickled.
I brought a second burger back to Moss Vale for my partner, who was less keen to leave the throw-rug of our Airbnb for the half-hour trip to Wingello. By this time, all the components have had more time to mingle and develop in their white paper bag. Brilliant with half a glass of last night’s gamay at 11:30am.
Thanks go to two-time Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championship finalist, and taco chef, Toby Wilson for alerting me to the burger three weeks ago. Wilson only discovered it after seeing an ad for the cafe before The Penguin Lessons at Bowral’s Empire Cinema. (NB: The Bruggeman family has a YouTube channel where you can watch all their house-made cinema ads, dating back to 2020. It is absolutely worth your time.)
Like our regional Chinese restaurants, agricultural shows and vanilla slice-famous bakeries, Wingello Village Store is one of those great “only in Australia” spots that tourism boards could spend more time promoting – especially to city-dwellers who would increasingly rather jump on a Disney Wonder cruise than explore their own backyard. The burger doesn’t taste like cheap thrills and corporate grease. It tastes like Paul Kelly singalongs and sunsets and Sunday drives. It tastes like a kitchen that gives a damn.
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