New Zealand used to have two options for sauce: red or yellow. Then an unsung culinary hero at a fledgling burger chain came along and changed everything.
Guy Cowan remembers the moment his culinary life changed forever. It was the late 90s and he’d just arrived at BurgerFuel, then still a new chain marketed as a sort of gentrified McDonald’s with big buns and non-toxic ingredients. The burger was pretty good. But the true star of the show was in the supporting cast. His kūmara fries came with a strangely gelatinous white sauce. He dipped a chip in the pottle, and stepped through the dietary equivalent of the wardrobe door into Narnia. “Revolutionary,” he says. “It opened up new horizons of flavour.”
From that moment, Cowan was hooked. Every week, he’d scrounge for BurgerFuel aioli like a ferret attacking a kiwi nest. He’d sometimes go to outlets and order chips on their own. When that wasn’t enough, he tried to buy the sauce in bulk from a school friend who worked at the restaurant. “It’s the black tar heroin under the bridge experience of the sauce world,” he says. “After my first taste, I had an itch only a small plastic pottle of BurgerFuel aioli could scratch.”
Cowan’s story is a microcosm of the nation’s story. He’s just one man, but thousands of New Zealanders have undergone a similar culinary transfiguration. Before BurgerFuel arrived in Ponsonby in 1995, New Zealand was ruled by Big Tomato. Watties held a monopoly not just on the market, but on our collective soul. If a dish called for sauce, you generally had two options: red or yellow. The exceptions were fish, where tartare could make an appearance, and salad, where slatherings of watery mayonnaise were a popular topping.
Aioli was undeniable. It broke into the market through sheer force of flavour. BurgerFuel wasn’t the first. A 1961 article from The Press on “ways of cooking with man-appeal” mentions an exotically named foreign dish called aioli. Nor was it alone. Around the time BurgerFuel chain started serving the sauce, the Middle Eastern takeout chain Fatimas was serving its koftas with aioli. Former Spinoff food editor and former Wellingtonian Alice Neville swears cafés were doling out dollops of Spanish sauce in the heyday of New Zealand’s coolest little capital as well. But the burger chain’s aioli was arguably the best, and undeniably the most popular. No other local variants of the sauce hit like BurgerFuel’s. Nor did they find the same kind of mass consumer cut-through.
Dozens of people have written into The Spinoff to describe being profoundly moved by their first taste of the burger chain’s white gold. “It changed the trajectory of my chip consumption forever,” says former Spinoff writer turned tech worker Josie Adams. “Had my first hit at uni – heaven. Hooked. KFC may have its chicken salt chips, but nothing compares to the BurgerFuel aioli,” says financial commentator Frances Cooke. “I think about this aioli all the time. I would cross treacherous waters for this aioli,” says RNZ in-depth reporter Kirsty Johnston. “Oh god I think you’re right. BurgerFuel might have introduced 1990s New Plymouth to aioli,” says Te Papa chief executive and The Spinoff mortal enemy Courtney Johnston.
Just about the only source unwilling to pay tribute to BurgerFuel’s aioli is BurgerFuel itself. The Spinoff first emailed the restaurant chain about its signature sauce more than two years ago. Its marketing manager responded with a polite, breezily written email offering to put me in touch with the chain’s “mad burger scientist” Chris Mills, who’s been working at the company for 27 years.
More than two dozen emails and 740 days later, The Spinoff is still waiting for that interview. At one point, Mills’ responses to written questions got as far as the chain’s chief executive before being spiked. BurgerFuel’s aversion to journalism is well-documented, but still hurtful. An NBR article notes it doesn’t let reporters attend its annual meeting and rarely responds to media questions.
Even so, what kind of company wouldn’t want to comment on a story entirely focused on the deliciousness of its best product? What does this chain have to fear? The answer may lie in an old Reddit post positing an incisive and relatable question. “Why is aioli so popular in NZ?” it asks. A horde of people respond crediting BurgerFuel with popularising the sauce. Among them is one who delivers some tantalising extra information. “I was good mates with the chef who designed BurgerFuel’s original menu, and that was in 1995. The aioli was there from day one, and that was the first time I’d ever heard of it,” the person says, before adding a kicker. “Random fact: The chef was Gil Wright, brother of NZ-famous comedy TV guy Mark Wright.”
The Spinoff contacted Mark Wright. He confirmed his older brother, whose name is really spelt Gill, came up with the aioli back in the 90s. But the family was in a period of flux and Gill wasn’t up to being interviewed. Over the next few months, Wright expanded a little on his initial email, hinting at lingering tension between Gill and BurgerFuel over the severance of their business relationship. But the interview never came about, and Wright eventually stopped responding to emails and calls. BurgerFuel didn’t reply to a request for comment about Gill.
Though the detail is sparse, it seems Gill Wright should be credited with inventing BurgerFuel aioli, just as Rosemary Dempsey should be celebrated more than Nestlé for coming up with Kiwi Onion Dip. His recipe’s impact has been immense, almost singlehandedly putting BurgerFuel on the map. Christchurch bakery owner Sam Ellis worked in the chain’s Morningside satellite kitchen as an aioli technician for six months in 2009, and still regularly prompts outpourings of excitement when he tells people it was his first job in food. The role was surprisingly manual. Ellis recalls pouring canola oil into a 20 litre jerry can with vivid marker on it to denote amounts, and then dripping it slowly into a Hobart planetary mixer containing egg yolks.
Once the mix was complete, he added garlic, apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper. Unlike some producers, they didn’t use water to bulk out the sauce. The team would pump out two tonnes of the product every week despite not taking shortcuts. “This is just a very well made aioli,” says Ellis. “They could’ve chosen to make an aioli a lot cheaper than they did, when you take into account the ingredients and the manual input, but they chose to make a really good one. So kudos to them.”
The recipe is so good, Ellis is still chasing the dragon. He offers a knockoff version of BurgerFuel’s aioli in his own bakery, Grizzly Baked Goods. “The greatest missed opportunity for BurgerFuel in the last 20 years is that this is not on the supermarket shelves,” he says. “I think it would be a stone cold killer.”
Cowan, aged 15 and trying desperately to scrounge bags of aioli from his 17-year-old burger technician friend, would have agreed. Thousands of people harbour a similar passion. BurgerFuel may be silent but the fans are loud, calling out in unison: “aioli, aioli, aioli”. There’s a world of economic possibility out there if BurgerFuel ever decides to capitalise on its most beloved product. But if it does change its mind, and finally puts its sauce out to the mass market 30 years after it changed the nation’s culinary landscape, let’s hope it throws a few dollars the way of the unsung hero who created it in the first place.
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