Japanese Fast Food Does Not Make For Pleasant

Vincent: And you know what they call a… a… a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

Jules: They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese?

Vincent: No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn’t know what the @#%& a Quarter Pounder is.

Jules: Then what do they call it?

Vincent: They call it a Royale with cheese.

Jules: A Royale with cheese. What do they call a Big Mac?

Vincent: Well, a Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it le Big-Mac.

Jules: Le Big-Mac. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call a Whopper?

Vincent: I dunno, I didn’t go into Burger King.

If you were living under a rock in the 1990s, or weren’t born yet, that’s an exchange between two hit men in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic, Pulp Fiction. If you’re anywhere near my age, Pulp Fiction was probably one of the most quotable movies of your college years, and if you’re not – then when you’re old enough, you should definitely check out this brilliant film.

(If you still ride a school bus, you’re not old enough yet).

Considering this was a short scene in a violent movie about drug kingpins, murderers, and a washed up old boxer, it had a tremendous impact on my life as a world traveler.  The first time I left the good ole U.S.A. was the year after Pulp Fiction became a pop culture phenomenon.  I was a junior in college and about to spend a good chunk of the school year studying abroad in England.  The first time I met the other kids I’d be traveling with, one of the first conversations we had about plans for the semester overseas was going to Paris… not to see the museums, the Eiffel Tower, or to eat a baguette, but because all of us wanted a Royale with cheese.

That mild obsession with American style fast food joints in foreign lands has carried over all these years, and when I travel, I love trying the local junk food.  I like to experience different foods, local cuisines, and regional delicacies, but sometimes travel is as much about exploring similarities as it is about embracing the differences.  That’s exactly what my quest for a great hamburger in Japan was all about.

I’m going to be honest – during my twelve days in Japan, I had a number of amazing meals. Okonomiyaki in Osaka was fantastic, the red snapper we had in Nara was incredible, and the do-it-yourself-Sumo-pot in Tokyo will rank as one of my all time favorite dining experiences.  However, nearly every meal terrified me.

Just about every single plate that was set down in front of me scared the crap out of me.  As the leader of a group of more than 40 American tourists, most of them middle school students, I knew I had to set a good example and eat up, but when the plate was delivered, more often than not, I didn’t know if I could do it.  It was just too weird, too different, too head-still-attached, and too little beady eyeballs staring at me and mocking my fears-y.

I’d sweat it out for a while, look around and see who was already eating and sometimes how they were eating, and eventually I’d work up the courage to dig in.  That said, once I pushed past the presentation and appearance, almost everything I ate was delicious.  The aforementioned red snapper showed up on my plate and I wasn’t even sure it was dead, but once I tried it, and I don’t usually like fish, it was unbelievable.  But there was this underlying dread and anxiety as each meal time approached, wondering if my dinner would still be breathing, if it would be staring at me, and if I could get up the nerve to eat it.  I tried to play like I was fearless, but I wasn’t.

Sure, there have been plenty of places I’ve been where the food wasn’t the greatest.  There’ve been plenty of times I was still hungry after a meal, but in most of the places I’ve been, a quick walk out of the hotel to a convenience store or a gas station and I had some chips, some candy bars, maybe even a sandwich.  Not in Japan.  There I found squid jerky, octopus and barbeque flavored Cheeto-like puffs, dried insect candy, and things that had pictures of an animal on it, so I assumed that’s what it was, but it looked more like their insides than their outsides, and I just couldn’t do it.

Before we left, I’d done a great deal of research on Japanese fast foods – street eats, noodle shops, crepes, odd doughnuts… and what kept popping up in my reading was Japanese burger joints.  Thus began the lunchtime quest for a decent burger in Japan.  Not to shun Japanese cuisine, but to fill my belly and ease that anxiety so I could approach dinner with a better attitude each night.

I am not the least bit ashamed to admit that in twelve days, I tried four different Japanese fast food burger joints (passing by every McDonald’s and Burger King I saw, because that is cheating), and some of those experiences may have been far more disturbing than the dinners that tried to have a staring contest with me.  I know it sounds like I’m not really embracing a true Japanese experience if I’m seeking out American foods, but I want to make sure that you understand that there’s very little American about a Japanese burger joint.

Mos Burger

The first burger we came across was at a rest stop alongside the highway.   This was early in the trip, and so far I’d enjoyed all my Japanese food (of course after I got past the look of it), but when I saw a sign for Mos Burger, my heart started racing – I don’t know if that was excitement, or if my circulatory system knew what was about to get shoved into it and started working overtime to prepare.

We didn’t have a super long stop, so I dashed past the racks of random sea creature jerky, past the vending machine selling t-shirts, and past the robotic noodle dispenser and jumped into the Mos Burger line.  The menu board didn’t look all that different from a burger place back home, until you looked at the food.  There were about five different types of rice burgers.  What in the world is a rice burger?  I’ve heard of turkey burgers, bean burgers, soy burgers, but rice burgers?  Then there was a picture of a chicken sandwich that looked like someone had set a bird’s nest on top of it, and that was next to a picture of soup that seriously looked like a bowl of urine.  Then I saw what I was looking for, Mos Burger’s signature sandwich – the appropriately named Mos Burger.

I hadn’t seriously thought through how I was going to bridge the language gap to order my Mos Burger, and before I could develop a plan, I was at the front of the line.  I panicked.  I held up one finger, hoping that would indicate that I wanted a #1 combo meal and that would be the end of that.  But, the incredibly happy Mos Girl behind the counter asked me a series of questions that I could only assume meant things about super-sizing and my choice of Mos Beverage.  I did what any ill prepared American would do in my shoes, I simply said, “Coca-Cola,” and hoped that properly answered all her Mos Questions.

I generally pride myself in trying to be a traveler, not a tourist, but my burger craving led to panic and I shoved some amount of Yen in her general direction and smiled politely, hoping that friendliness would outweigh the idiotness I was exuding at the moment.  She handed me back my Mos Change and in perfect English said, “have a nice day.”

Before long my Mos Burger was ready.  A thimble-sized paper cup of Coke and some steaming hot fries were both in the bag along with the burger, so I sat in the dining area and dove in.

If anyone reading this ever winds up in Japan, I’ll tell you now that “cheating” and enjoying a Mos Burger instead of more traditional Japanese cuisine is not cheating at all.  This, in every sense of the words, was a unique cultural experience.  The burger itself was decent – not too terribly different from a Burger King meat patty on a McDonald’s bun.  If I’d gotten that at home, I probably wouldn’t ever return to that restaurant, but what made the meal truly Japanese-ish was the condiments.

The burger comes topped with a slice of tomato the size of a hub cap.  Seriously, the tomato slice is twice as thick as the meat patty, and as big around as the bun.  I would love to see the mutant tomatoes those Mos Chefs are slicing up in the back, because this one slice would have made a fantastic frisbee, and I’m pretty sure they came from a farm nearby whatever disaster created Mothra.

Besides tomatozilla, the only other condiment on the burger was this chunky sauce that looked kind of like meatless chili and salsa had a baby, then that baby married some tomato soup and they had a baby.  It tasted kind of like a vegetarian had picked all the meat out of some sloppy joe and then dumped it on the burger, and it made picking up the sandwich about as simple as eating oatmeal with your fingers.

In case this isn’t translating right – It was delicious.

And that sauce was even better on the fries, which I wound up using kind of like chopsticks to pick up the majority of the Mos Burger, which had sort of melted into a delicious pile of sloppy goo.  I looked around the restaurant and saw that none of the locals were having the troubles I was having, but they also looked bored and zombified, where as I was having the time of my life.

Before too long, a few of the kids in the group saw me “eating,” which wasn’t so much eating as it really was more of a smearing of food in the general area around my mouth, and ordered their own.  I think everyone enjoyed the experience, but it wasn’t the comfort of a real American burger I was craving.

First Kitchen

My second attempt at finding a taste of home was a few days later.  Eating at First Kitchen wasn’t a conscious choice so much as it was fate leading us down an all beef-patty paved path.  My little group of kids were actually craving an authentic lunch experience in Osaka.  We’d found ourselves in this star shaped shopping district of town, with side-street spokes branching out in different directions.  Right at the hub, where Miss K., our tour director, had dropped us off, was First Kitchen, a two-story Mecca to American style gluttony and caloric overload.

We headed down the first corridor, hoping to find a quick noodle place or something more authentic, but every restaurant we passed was either full, too expensive for our liking, or required a sit-down meal that would take more time than we wanted to spend when there was so much more of the city to see.

It’s easy to be shy on these trips, but you have to overcome that sometimes, so I forced one of the boys out of his comfort zone and made him ask a local.  We spotted two high school aged boys, hoped they spoke more English than we spoke Japanese, and asked.  The conversation was quick.  We asked them to help us find something quick and cheap to eat, and they pointed back where we came from and said, “Try Fakkin over there.”

Up until that point, every local we’d met was incredibly helpful and polite, so I was so shocked to hear filthy language directed at us that I couldn’t get going right away.  Eventually we waved to the guys and moved along, all of us muttering about how Fakkkin rude those guys were.  It was a good half minute before one of us had one of those cartoon lightbulbs go off over our heads, realizing that Fakkin wasn’t a curse word, but the name of a restaurant.

Feeling a little better, we retraced our steps looking for Fakkin, passing First Kitchen again and heading down the opposite spoke.  By the time we’d come all the way to the end of the spoke, we still hadn’t found Fakkin, so we turned around and trudged back to the middle, passed the First Kitchen again and tried a third corridor.  The restaurants there were the same degree of busy, pricy, and slow, and Fakkin was nowhere to be found still.

It was a Fakkin mystery.

Finally, we decided to ask for help again.  Believe it or not, there was a churro stand, which was our cultural lesson for the day – what we thought was a Spanish or Mexican dessert actually came from the Far East originally.  The churros reenergized us, and the very nice churro guy told us Fakkin was just a few shops down, right in the middle of the mall.

We’d been to the middle of the mall several times, there was no Fakkin there.  There was a music shop, a jewelry store, a bank, and First Kitchen.  Fate had called; our search for an authentic Japanese lunch was thrown out the window, First Kitchen it was.

As soon as we stepped inside, I noted two things – First Kitchen felt like stepping into an alien’s idea of what an American fast food joint would look like – and – it was the orangest place I’d ever seen.

Those are the only two nice things I have to say about First Kitchen.  The food was disgusting.  I used my patented “hold some fingers up” method to order a combo meal, but I think I botched that up, because I thought I was ordering a deep fried chicken sandwich, but I got something I didn’t even see on the menu about nine-tenths of a second later – literally, the order taker turned around with some sort of speedy ninja spin maneuver and grabbed a sandwich that was already sitting there.  I looked down at my wallet to dig out the appropriate amount of Yen and a Coke and some fries seemed to have arrived without human assistance.

I sat down in what had to be the tiniest and orangest chair I’d ever sat on and unwrapped the something.  What I found was a bun that looked just like the McDonald’s hamburger buns, a slice of the world’s most inflexible cheese (seriously, I thought it was plastic and the corners were kind of sharp and stabby), a glob of mayonnaise that looked like it’d been shot all fancy-like out of a Redi-Whip can, a circular egg patty (think the eggs on an Egg McMuffin – if the eggs on an Egg McMuffin had a baby with Elmer’s Glue), some micro-onions, and two pieces of the least bacon-y bacon I’ve ever encountered.  The star of the show was a “meat” patty that tasted like someone had “beef-flavored” some dirt.

The Coke was good.

I was still carrying the cup from First Kitchen when we met up with Miss K. later on.  She noticed it, giggled a little, and asked, “Did you eat lunch at Fakkin?  Fakkin is not good.”  She was right it’s Fakkin gross.  And Fakkin confusing.

Freshness Burger

This may be terribly American of me, but one of the secret pleasures of traveling the world is finding things that are oddly translated into English.  For example, I have an app on my phone called Word Lens.  You’re supposed to be able to turn it on and aim your phone’s camera at text written in certain foreign languages and it will translate it for you right there on the screen.  I tried it out for the first time in Poland last summer, but the app doesn’t have a Polish to English setting, so I tried using both German and Russian to figure out what the menu board at a polish kebab stand said.  It didn’t work right.

I found a sandwich that looked really good on the menu and aimed the camera at the description beneath the picture, hoping to find what it was made up of.  It told me the sandwich was a “topless hedgehog mask.”  I’m pretty sure that was incorrect, but the sandwich was delicious.  Next time you’re in Krakow, you should definitely try a topless hedgehog mask at the first food stand you find.

I didn’t have that app when we were in Japan, but a lot of the signs there are written in English anyway.  Fortunately for giggly Americans who find poor translations amusing, they don’t seem to have hired many native English speakers to help them with those signs.

Freshness Burger suffered from that problem.  Right on their front door, in big bold letters, was their company’s poorly translated slogan – “Freshness Burger: We Make For Pleasant.”

Strangely enough, they did.

We dashed into a Freshness Burger location for lunch on our last day in Kyoto.  My goal was simply a dollar menu type item to tide me over, then a series of more Japanese-ish snacks along the way as we toured the city, but as soon as I walked through Freshness Burger’s hilariously translated doors, I was all in.

The smells were amazing.  Fresh baked bread, char-broiled meat, and grilling onions…  It was the smell of America.  When it was my turn to order, I noticed there was no dollar menu type options, so I went for the number one combo.  It took about fifteen minutes for everyone to get their food – after a while I began to wonder if maybe the cook had gone out to find some beef somewhere, and maybe he was riding something really slow, like a cow, and that cow was intentionally taking him the wrong direction to save his cow friends from the Freshness Burger guy’s wrath.

Eventually the food arrived, and it was worth the wait.  Fresh baked buns, buttered, and toasted up on the grill.  Real cheese – which is the only dairy product I saw in Japan that seemed to have ever involved a cow.  And, there was fancy looking lettuce instead of the shredded with a wood chipper type you get at the low end places. Add a fresh slice of tomato and some crisp onions, and you have a burger that looked like it would have rivaled the best quick service burgers back home.

The one strike against the Freshness Burger was the meat itself.  It was cooked perfectly, juicy and well-seasoned, but there was a funky taste that made me wonder where they cow came from – I’m fairly certain it was Neptune or a farm where instead of grass they allow the livestock to graze on cilantro and jelly beans, leading to an odd tasting burger.  It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

There is some truth in advertising, though – for the most part, Freshness Burger really did make for pleasant.  Oddly enough, their slogan made for far more pleasant than their food did.

Dom Dom Burger

One of the most incredible experiences we’ve ever had in our travels was an excursion to the the Yahoo! Dome to see the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks baseball game.  The game itself was insane.  We sat in the outfield, and out there each team has their own special cheering section, and when I say special, I don’t mean the regular kind of special, I mean a special kind of special.

One section away from us was the Hawks cheering section.  There was a guy with a megaphone down in the first row, and when the home team was up, he’d stand up, turn his back to the field, and yell into the megaphone at the crowd.  They’d respond with different cheers and songs to go with each batter in the Hawks lineup, not that we could understand any of them, but this section of about 300 fans looked like there was about to be 500 aneurysms.

At the back of the section, which was in left-centerfield, there was a band – trumpets, trombones, some sort of horn that looked like it may have eaten a tuba, a row of snare drums, and a bass drum that had to have come straight out of a parade in a Dr. Seuss book.  Each song the crowd chanted was accompanied by a bone-shaking beating of the drums, a blaring of the trumpets, and some quake-ish blasts from tuba-saurus.  Then there was the clapping and the flags.  I’ve had the joy of traveling to many different countries, and I’m fairly certain the Hawks fans were waving flags that were larger than some of those entire nations.

The seventh inning stretch included a mass letting go of yellow and black balloons that shot all over the dome, and the post game show involved postgame fireworks and dozens of dancers out on the field.

None of this, I’m aware, has anything to do with Japanese hamburgers, but I had to set the stage and make you aware that a Japanese baseball game is an attack on almost all of your senses, but, since the only thing you haven’t done with the fireworks, flags, tuba monsters, drums, and screaming megaphone guys is taste – eventually you’ll wander off to the concession stand.

It was there that I found Domdom Burger.  The concession options in Fukuoka (that’s the city, while SoftBank is the name of the cell phone company that sponsors the team, and Hawks is the mascot) were not very familiar.  Looking at the menu board at the stadium’s regular food stands, I couldn’t identify a single item as actually being food.  This was pretty late in our trip, so I was already used to being served some odd stuff, but it was all just brought to me (and almost all of it was good).  I didn’t have much faith that I could pick something and be happy with it.

I kept wandering through the concourse and found a Subway.  A meatball sub sounded like it would definitely make for pleasant right then and there, but alas, the Subway in Japan did not seem to have meatballs.  Or deli meats.  Or cheese.  Or vegetables I’ve seen before.  In fact, just about every sandwich pictured on the menu looked like scrambled eggs on bread – only they weren’t scrambled eggs, and I didn’t know what they were.  There were Sam I Am’s favorite, green eggs on honey wheat, and there were brown scrambled eggs on white, tan colored egg looking stuff on…  I couldn’t even look anymore.

The next counter over was Domdom.  The logo was a big red elephant, so I didn’t have high hopes that it was something I really wanted to eat.  I had visions of Kruger Park poachers selling ill-gotten pachyderm parts in a dark alley behind the Domdom loading docks, but when I got close enough to see the menu – burgers and fries.

The Domdom burger, at least the picture on the menu, looked like a middle ground between the terrible First Kitchen and the intriguing Mos Burger.  I couldn’t get to the front of the line soon enough.

Since the game was at night, and we were missing the dinner that was included in our tour, we were each given a few hundred Yen to buy dinner at the ballgame.  I immediately began calculating how I could get the most Domdom bang for my bucks.  There was a “dollar” menu type combo meal, with what looked like a standard Burger King cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke.  I got three of those.

It took me a while to juggle my three cardboard box trays full of what may have been elephant-y goodness and the three fries and three drinks all the way back to my seats, but I managed. The first bite was everything I’d been craving all along – it was not good at all, but it was perfect in it’s own simple, cheap, slightly disgusting way.  It wasn’t good in an it’s interesting sense like the Mos Burger and it wasn’t gross in the way that the Fakkin burger was Fakkin gross, and it wasn’t the quality and freshness that made the Freshness Burger so for pleasant.   It was good because it was home – it was, and several of us agreed, the exact same bun and cheeseburger you get in every single middle school cafeteria in America.  It was good, because it was a foil wrapped, ketchup smothered, made of questionable meat cure for homesickness.

The moral of the story is simple.  When you travel, try the local delicacies, expand your horizons, try try try to be a bit fearless, but, at the same time, don’t be ashamed by your need to have something familiar too – sampling foreign food that is a little less foreign can be an incredible cultural experience as well, and even if you can’t find an odd foreign brand, it’ll always be cool to have a Royale with cheese.