A flagship hamburger at a hamburger joint is a pretty common concept. Like, for instance, how In-N-Out just makes the one burger. You can ask for customizations, of course, like you can anywhere, but as far as their menu goes it's just the one burger with three options for how many patties are on it.
Now the national burger chains tend to have a wider range on their menus, including options like chicken, fish sandwiches, and even salads and wraps. But most of them also have a flagship burger, the halo product, usually with a catchy brand, that informs large chunks of the rest of their menu. Stuff like the Baconator, who's bacon spans Wendy's menu clear down to the Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger, or the Whopper, which can be had in a variety of different sizes and forms like the Whopper Jr. So, bearing that in mind, what would you say is the flagship burger at MacDOOOOOONLDS?
It's the Big Mac, right? Like, that's what the Mac is for. It's named after the actual-pants restaurant. So surely it's the flagship. Right?
Turns out? No. Not only is the Big Mac not the most premium burger on offer at Maaaaaaaaaaa's, but it's also not the burger that informs the rest of the menu. It's just a single, stand-alone sandwich that, and this surprised me, doesn't even command their highest price for a burger. As it turns out even McDon's knows that the Big Mac is a stupid piece of crap, and so they won't even put their best beef on it. It uses the same patties as their really cheap dollar menu burgers, patties which are embarrassingly thin, devoid of moisture, and utterly incapable of holding their own versus a burger which is, by volume, about 95% lettuce and bun.
In fact if you go look up McCrundle's own ad copy for the Big Mac, it identifies those patties as being simply "beef". If, however, you go look up the ad copy for the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Mr Crundle makes quite a big show over how the beef is American raised, fresh, and present in the full, appropriate quarter-pound weight (pre-cooked weight, of course).
Which if the Big Mac was supposed to be the flagship burger for this place, would be absolutely wild. Think of it this way; the Quarter Pounder with Cheese has a single patty that is about the same total weight as the two patties in the Big Mac. If the Quarter Pounder sits equivalent to the Dave's Single from Wendy's, the Big Mac is basically a Double Stack with an extra bun in the middle and an entire head of iceberg lettuce for reasons nobody quite understands. By comparison, the Double Stack is a value sandwich that uses much lower quality ingredients than the Dave's Single, and costs less than half as much. It is not, cannot be, and will never have a prayer of being referred to as Wendy's flagship burger. And by that metric, I'm going to go ahead and say the Big Mac likewise cannot be a flagship burger.
It sucks, and even McDunce's knows it. 100% guarantee it's only on the menu because the brainwashed masses buy it and the margins on it are amazing. Iceberg lettuce and bread cost nothing when compared to beef.
All that aside I have now tried, for the first time in a very, very long time let's be honest, McBumble's actual flagship burger. I have compared it pretty much directly against its closest competitor among the Big Three in fast food, the Dave's Single from Wendy's, and I can, with great confidence, assert that the beef patty on the Quarter Pounder is very comparable to the quarter-pound patties on Wendy's higher-end burgers, starting on the lower end with the Dave's Single. In terms of taste it was of a similar quality, though I do still wish McDork's would use a bit more (read: any at all) pepper in their food just generally speaking.
That said, I'm never getting one again, and that comes down to the fact that every single other ingredient on the sandwich was markedly inferior to what I got from Wendy's. And I mean every single one. The bun was spongier and flavorless, the sauce balance was like 80% cheap mustard, the pickles were bland, and the only notable flavor was that of an entire half an onion on the sandwich. Like, the burger itself wasn't balanced super well by whoever put it together, which is a run-to-run variance sort of thing, but the overall construction of the burger and its ingredients as mandated by MaWamble Corporate is just bad. It was all harsh flavors with no depth and no fresh ingredients, like lettuce or tomato, to cut through. It was awful.
And the rub, of course, is that I'd be willing to customize my burger order into something more palatable I suppose (without mustard or onion, add tomato and lettuce), but it's frankly not worth it when the Dave's Single I'm comparing to, which requires no edits, actually costs less!
(price as of date of order, subject to wild fluctuations in this day and age, welcome to late-stage capitalism)
This is endemic with pretty much everything at McDonald's, and you know I'm being serious now because I just used their actual-pants name. The food, where it's not actively disgusting, is at least overpriced. You can get better food for similar or less money at dozens of other restaurants, including other national burger chains like Wendy's and yes, even Burger King. If you're local to me and you want a cheap burger that actually tastes
good, go to In-N-Out. If you don't mind paying the post-pandemic price
of the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, go to Morty's. You can get their Iconic Burger for about that same price last I checked.
There simply isn't any reason you can give me to justify eating crap like the Quarter Pounder that will make sense beyond simply saying "I've tried other fast food places recently and I like McDonald's flavors better". Which makes it a matter of personal taste, and I'll accept that. That does of course mean I will automatically disregard any recommendations you make on food ever again, though, because from where I'm standing you have terrible taste.
The best part of all this is that I have now, I'm confident, jumped right to the top of the burgers "McDangle's" even offers. Looking at their menu the Quarter Pounder is the flagship. The position it commands in advertising, as well as the acknowledged quality of its ingredients versus everything else on there, makes that clear. And it got its butt kicked by a burger from Wendy's that I'd describe as "comfortably in the middle" of their offerings. This wasn't the Big Bacon Classic, or something from their Made to Crave menu, to say nothing of their actual flagship, the Baconator. This was just a lowly Dave's Single, which is rapidly cementing itself as inarguably the best quality "average burger" you can get at a national chain.
Though I guess I probably should give Carl's Jr a shot at that spot before I pass final judgement.
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