The Whopper

Better than I was expecting. That's the summary of my experience here; It was better than I was expecting.

To be absolutely clear that's not exactly high praise. Depending on context it might not even be praise at all. So I suppose that's what the rest of these words down her are for. Context. And huh, would you look at that. There sure are a lot of them down there. 

Right, where shall we start? We may as well start with the obvious positives. Burger King's fries continue to be among the best I've ever had, and they managed not to screw up Dr. Pepper. This already places them far above the likes of MyDuudes. I'm also a fan of the sesame seed buns they use, they're not like bakery quality or anything like that, but they've got some substance to them, they taste fine, and the seeds look good and add a little somethin' somethin' to each bite. The beef on the Whopper itself was, likewise, adequate. Nothing incredible, mind you, but it had some flavor and it filled the bun up pretty well.

But what about the sandwich as a whole? Within the realm of fast food burgers the Whopper has attained the status of legend. The brand has been around since 1957, predating even the Big Mac, and during that entire time it's been the poster-boy of Burger King's menu. The flagship sandwich, if you will. It was originally billed as "a whole meal on a burger" and in addition to the much wider, ostensibly 3rd pound beef patty, it had copious amounts of veg and a full array of sauces. Now I obviously can't compare the sandwich I just ate to the original Whopper or to the competing burgers of the time until Laurence finishes that time machine.

C'mon dude, get on it.

What I can compare the Whopper to is everything else I can buy at every other fast food joint today. The simple fact of the matter is that as constructed this is the most bog-standard burger out there. Bun, sauce, patty, lettuce, tomato, onion. It's what my parents set out to accompany every cookout we ever had as a kid, and it's the same basic construction you'll find on just about every other standard fast food burger from every other fast food joint. So how did what I eat compare to literally the baseline of hamburgers everywhere?

It was pretty dang average. Like, if you take all the best generic burgers you've ever eaten (whether they were cooked on your own grill and fixed up with stuff from the grocery store or made for you somewhere like Five Guys or Habit Burger) and average that out with all of the worst generic burgers you've ever eaten (oh hey Big Mac, fancy seeing you again in this article), the result would be the Whopper. It's bigger than might be average, but to what benefit? There's more bun, but the amount of veg was not appropriate for the width of the patty, and the patty itself, while I will buy that it was 3rd pound, was wide enough to be just as thin as anything MaDmandle's ever made. A third pound patty on a normal sized burger feels like an occasion, just look at, weirdly, the more premium burgers I remember from Hardee's about 15 years ago. But the patty on the Whopper feels... normal.

Which is maybe a win considering I was kinda expecting to be massively let down. Maybe I was just hedging my bets. The Whopper isn't a bad burger. It is, as I said, the dictionary definition of the average fast food burger. I'd almost call it the baseline. Any worse than this and you've got a bad burger. Better than this and you've got a good burger. But the Whopper itself is just... fine. And maybe that makes sense, given that this has been the standard other chains have been competing against for holy crap like 65 years... that's wild. So I didn't hate the sandwich. The coupon I used to get my sample here included a full large combo meal plus a second large Whopper combo for $12, which in today's economy is a solid deal for two large combos (it's basically buy-one get-one versus full menu price). Honestly the burger didn't need to be great to justify that cost, considering I also got my Dr. Pepper and Burger King's fries are still kinda blowing my mind.

Seriously can't believe I didn't know how good these things were till now.

But at full price I don't think the Whopper would be worth it. It's fine, I don't hate it, but for a similar amount of money I could get a Dave's single or an entire small meal at In-N-Out, and while those are hardly the best fast food burgers ever made, they are better than the Whopper.

And actually for a similar amount of money I could get something like the Son of Baconator, which brings me to another sticking point. The Whopper has heritage, no denying that. The Big Mac does too, it originally launched about a decade after the Whopper. Of the flagship sandwiches from the Big Three fast food joints, Wendy's flagship is far and away the youngest. The Baconator came out in 2007. But of the three flagships, the Baconator is the only one that actually feels like an occasion. The other two are either bog standard or 75% bread by volume, which is to say way worse than the average burger.

With that in mind I can't help but look at the Whopper and wonder whether, after 65 years, the thing should just retire. Reinvent the wheel, Burger King, do something crazy. Or at the very least give the poor thing a makeover. Because I think I understand why you're not having much success making headway against the prevailing fast-food winds on the market when the flagship burger on your menu is literally the most generic burger on sale anywhere.

This thing may have set the standard in the 50's, I don't know. But just about everyone else has either run ahead of it or died out in the time since then. So yeah, I was kinda expecting the Whopper to suck, and it didn't, not entirely. As I said at the top it was better than I was expecting. But in 2023 there is no longer anything special about the Whopper, and I honestly just can't recommend it.