The food-blog web is snickering with news that McDonald's outlets in Japan are doing a new burger promotion called Big America 2 (yes, it's a sequel, meaning they've done this before).
The burgers, hilarious caricatures and revealing in how Japan sees us, are shown above in all their glory, but if you can't tell what's in them, allow me to elaborate:
There's the Texas 2 Burger, with grated cheese, bacon and onions. The Manhattan Burger is sort of innocuous, with pastrami, mozzarella cheese, lettuce and tomato. If you expected the Idaho Burger to have some sort of semblance of potato, you'd be right: It contains hash browns under an onion bun, onions, cheese, mustard sauce and bacon (I admit: I would actually eat this).
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But it's with the Miami Burger that it becomes apparent someone at the McDonald's Japan office isn't so great with our regional specialties or our geography. It is hopelessly, if hilariously, the most misguided of the lot. It's stuffed full of tortilla chips, spicy
tomato sauce, cheese and taco meat (Yes, the burger has ground beef on top of ground beef and “spicy tomato sauce” in lieu of salsa).
I'd say all of the Southwestern
states dodged the shame bullet with this one.
But admit it, Japan, this is all some sort of payback for the
California Roll and Jack In the Box's teriyaki-chicken bowl, isn't it?
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.