Baud Attitude

While MOS Burger is pretty ubiquitous throughout Japan and many of its neighbor countries, it’s more-or-less unknown outside of the region.

That’s a shame, because it’s a good alternative to McDonalds or Burger King.  It has the image of being slightly healthier than the western fast food chains, and it’s got a taste that is a little hard to describe beyond “it’s LIKE a fast food hamburger, but more Japanese”.

I recognize that as not being a helpful descriptor.  I’m not being paid for this, you get what you get as far as analogies go.

Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous post, I had gone to Tokyo Tower and eaten some truly terrifying – if tasty! – pancakes.  While in the act, I’d noticed a sign… this sign, in fact:

JUST LOOK AT IT.  How do you even eat that?  I mean, it must be eaten – that’s a given – but do you pick it up with both hands and let the middle fall out, or do you break it down into several burgers or what?  And why am I not already finding out?

Well, the answer to that last was that I had just eaten way too much pancake.  I needed to find other things to do and then come back for this later.

Roughly four hours later…

Turns out, it comes in a bowl with a knife and fork provided.

I looked at the burger, looked at the shirt I was wearing, and picked up the utensils.

If you ARE daring enough to try to eat this with your hands, you will be well-served by the bun.  It’s actually got some substance to it and was toasted, so it doesn’t disintegrate like your average Japanese fast-food bun.  On the other hand, there’s no center bun – saving a FEW carbs there, good job – so there is going to be a high slippage factor if you try picking this one up.

There are also two burger patties, both seeming just a little bigger than your average McDonald’s burger patty.  Not quite quarter-pounder size, mind you, or Royale With Cheese if you want to get all Pulp Fiction, but you get a good amount of beef for your Y960 (about nine bucks).

That was expected, and the lettuce and nicely-thick slice of tomato were likewise unsurprising, if fresher than I’d normally expect from fast food.  Cheese, sure – it says “Cheese” right in the name and it’s fairly visible on the poster.

Then I got to the Canadian Bacon, and the two onion rings, and the diced onions, and the honest-to-god CHILI, and I knew that I had found Burger Nirvana, which come to think of it is probably the name of an actual hamburger place somewhere.  Wherever you are, Burger Nirvana of this world, you pale in comparison to the ideological CONCEPT of a blissful paradise of burgerness, and though I am sure you are very nice people you should probably just pack it in.

Did that get weird?

Anyway.

It was the best burger I’ve ever had in Japan, and the best fast food burger I’ve had anywhere.

Ever.

Granted, “best burger I’ve ever had in Japan” is a very low bar to step over, but I have eaten many fast food burgers in many countries, and this one has set a new high mark.

So.  If you happen to be in Tokyo, and are not yet sick of Tokyo Tower, just go eat one of these.

You can probably skip the fries.

I woke up this morning, my last full day in Japan, with the realization that I’d really accomplished everything I’d set out to do while here, I was running a little low on cash, and I should find a cheap way to get some breakfast and kill the morning.

My hotel is in easy walking range of Tokyo Tower, so what’s what I went with.

I’ve visited the tower probably half a dozen times before, of course, it’s a beloved tourist attraction even if it loses its ooh and ahh factor pretty quickly.  You get to go up quite high and look out across Tokyo, and on a clear day you can even catch a glimpse of Mt. Fuji, 97km away.

Today was not a clear day.  I could barely make out the Shinjuku Metropolitan Government Building, and that’s 6km away.

Anyway, before I went up, I went to the food court and found that there is a business called “Pink dot” (no relation to the failed mid-90s delivery service I am sure) that sells both pancakes and waffles, which are recognized as breakfast food by every country on this little blue planet of ours.

I will, however, admit that the manner in which Pink dot prepares their breakfast-appropriate food items is a little more…cake, than pancake.

Case in point, the “Caramel Banana Pancakes”, which I selected as the item on the menu that least resembled a giant sundae:

There were pancakes!  Three of them! A fairly generous serving of pancake!

With the pancakes came a mountain of whipped cream.  From slight color and consistency differences, it looks like the mountain was made of two kinds of whipped cream, though I could not begin to tell you the difference.  There was a scoop of banana-flavored ice cream lest the whipped cream not adequately fulfill your cream needs, some slices of banana, powdered sugar, and caramel sauce poured and/or drizzled over the entire thing.

There was enough sugar here to keep a small child – or a fully-grown man who should have known better – on a sugar high for HOURS, is what I’m getting at, and the bottle of syrup perched on the tray as if to say “just in case you’ve lost all sense of human dignity, add some extra sugar” really just added to the entire affect.

Look.

I’ve had plenty of Belgian waffles over the years, and there is always the depressing point where you run out of whipped cream and yet there is a solid quarter of the waffle left. These were decidedly the other way around.

Oh, and they only cost about six bucks.  Japan really is a pretty reasonably-priced place to visit.

For extra “oh, hell, let’s just see what my body can still handle”: while I was making my way through the plate full of sugary excess, I noticed an advertising sign for something even WORSE for me, and I decided that I would need to come back and eat it for lunch.  More on that tomorrow.

A couple of years ago, I spent two weeks in China, more-or-less evenly divided between Beijing and Shanghai.

I really don’t have a lot of positive things to say about the country, as a result. There was no sense of being a guest, rather I felt mostly like a wallet on legs that the locals did their very best to extract the contents of, frequently by offering me the services of young women for what would have been – sorry, ladies – a very short time indeed.

I do, however, have a very high opinion of the China-based branches of the “Hooters” restaurant chain, one of the few places I could go and find people that would talk to me in English and not try to sell me time with any of the staff.  Working at Hooters in China is apparently seen as a good way to get in lots of English conversation practice, and the majority of the wait staff that I spoke with had aspirations towards hotel management or international business and really wanted to chat. And chat. And make me stand up and sing songs.

This is where I should probably mention that I have scored a solid INTJ on every Myers-Briggs exam I have ever taken. I am scientifically proven to be an introvert, and singing “row, row, row your boat” in the middle of a restaurant full of other diners is a bloody master’s exam in the “how good am I at faking extroversion” class.

I will not at any point deny that the actual appeal of Hooters comes largely from being served by young women in short shorts and low-cut shirts, though – with all apologies – no amount of low cutting could have generated more than the slightest hint of cleavage. On the other hand, there would be loud music every half hour or so and the staff would put on a little dance routine, in which booty shaking was attempted.

Finally, and I admit that just now getting around to the food might not cast me in the proudest of lights, the burgers I had were excellent. They would have been unremarkable-to-good in the context of an American restaurant, but in China that stands out as quite a feat.

So, in the spirit of Scientific Inquiry, and finding myself in Tokyo in a hotel only four stations away from the Tokyo branch of the chain, I decided that I would try it to compare.

I will sum it up; it was All Wrong.

Here I will lead with the food, because they could have at least gotten that right.  I had the “Baja Burger”, described by the menu as being topped with guacamole and pico de gallo and – I will be very clear here – a “Mexican-style” burger.

I pray for the sake of the restaurant that nobody from Mexico ever tries it.

It did have a sort of green paste on it, which might have had avocados as a component, and there was a red paste as well which might have been the pico de gallo, but both were almost completely devoid of any flavor.  They were “green” and “red” and those are the only descriptors I can apply.  The bun was so bereft of any real substance that biting it was akin to chewing foam, and the burger patty… well, it was your typical Japanese burger patty; cooked medium well but without any searing done, and with no texture whatsoever.

So, you say, “a disappointing burger, but what about the customer service?” and I am sorry to report abject failure on that front as well.  I arrived, was seated, had my drink order taken, had my food order taken and food delivered, ate it, sat at the table for a while, and eventually got up and wandered over to the register to ask if they could print out my check and take my money.  The chatty style I would expect from an American or Chinese Hooters was not on display, and there was certainly no sign of periodic dance routine.

The official motto of the chain is “Hooters Makes You Happy”, but I will accept that a true reading is “Hooters: We Don’t Really Like You But We’re Paid To Fake It”. Japan seems to have fallen down on both counts.

As a final insult, because one had to be forthcoming, the bill – when finally produced – included a 10% service charge.

A tip.

In JAPAN.

I paid my Y2376, helped myself to a complimentary Hooters-branded uchiwa on my way out, and called it a lesson learned.

And then I wrote 750 words complaining about it. 🙂