After six decades of serving time-tested favourites that folks seem to enjoy and occasionally screwing about with new french fries, Burger King has decided it’s time to experiment with Tex-Mex for some godawful reason. So they put most of a Whopper in a soft tortilla. Sure.
It’s not quite a traditional fast food burrito, not quite just a Whopper crumpled up and rolled up. While most of the traditional elements of the Whopper are present — pickles, tomatoes, onions, burger meat, lettuce — the mayo has been replaced with a pepper cheese sauce (which isn’t all that peppery), and some places serve it with taco sauce, while others leave it off.
Also, unlike the traditional Whopper, it’s not good.
I’ve had two Whopperritos since they launched earlier this month. The first contained dry, bland meat, severely wilted lettuce, all the pickles they had in the restaurant and the odd tomato.
It was the worst thing I’ve had wrapped in a tortilla. The meat, not particularly flavorful in disc form, loses all but its texture when crumpled into bits. The only thing worse than letting lettuce sit atop a hot sandwich too long is trapping it inside a tortilla wrapper with its killer. That’s two flavours down, leaving us with eh cheese sauce, pickles, onions and sadness.
I pledged not to make a video, but snackology is dictated by the people, not the snackologist, so I gave the Whopperrito one more try.
WARNING: The video that follows features the merciless dissection of a food product.
This time around the Whopperrito featured taco sauce, which is listed as one of the ingredients on the Burger King website, despite myself and many others (like SnackTAYku) getting it served without. So this Whopperrito had a taste, and that taste was oily taco sauce and pickles.
We’re about to deep dive inside the Whopperrito. The weak of stomach may want to turn away.
Deep breaths. Here we go.
The inside of a burrito is never exactly pretty, but this…
In the span of the 10 minute drive home from the Burger King, the lettuce inside the Whopperrito has been murdered, its cell structure weakened by heat and pressure. It’s a shadow of itself, a wilted plant corpse torn to pieces and left to rot in a sea of meat. The hearty tomato valiantly struggles to retain some sense of self, but it’s clear that cheese sauce is a brick and it’s drowning slowly.
The pickle army approaches.
While taco sauce was included within this Whopperrito, which adds spice and a little heat, but it does absolutely nothing to enhance the beef, obviously a crumbled standard burger patty. Its primary contribution to the wrap is wetness.
“We’re too close to the edge, we’re going over!”
Speaking to the Chicago Tribune in an interview about the announcement of the Whopperrito, Burger King North America president Alex Macedo had this to say:
“It’s certainly one of the first times that we’ve tapped into the Tex-Mex category. It’s one of the fastest-growing categories — consumers like the freshness of it, they like the mix of flavours.”
Freshness.
Mix of flavours.
It’s like Burger King gets it, but isn’t really getting it, like a nurse in an operating theatre holding out a butter knife to the surgeon and cheerfully exclaiming, “scalpel!”
Or maybe they really do get it. The Whopperrito isn’t about good food. It’s about turning heads and getting bodies into restaurants. Burger King wants folks talking, and if it has to sacrifice its dignity to do it, then so be it.
Comments
5 responses to “Snacktaku Unwraps Burger King’s Whopperrito”
That 2nd shot looks like someone hurled on a doona mate!
Also that cheese has no right being that colour (knowing fully well that it’s the way yanks love it!)
This is what happens when you post an American article on an Australian site. You get the most Australian response.
Why is this article even here?
The Whopperrito isn’t happening in Australia, which only has Hungry Jacks, not Burger Kings.
Because people have a morbid fascination with gross American food
oh WTF…
Here I am thinking it was an Australian product, you since I’m on Kotaku.com.AfknU
I second your sentiments Lapetus -_-
why isn’t .afknu the australian top level domain?
There was an amusing article on Vice about the Whopperrito the other day, there was a lot more shame in it though!