Savers Double Cheese Burger / New York Classic - McDonalds, Everywhere.

As I am currently exploring a theme at present by looking at the low-end of the spectrum in the world of burgers, I have succumbed and ended up at McDonalds a few times in the last month or so.  From here on, its only up.

Burgers are one of the most versatile food groups as they come in so many different shapes and sizes with so many variations of ingredients, type, serving and quality, it is easy to write about them.  Many burger blogs don’t really go to the extremes that BBB has explored; most people know that if you pay anything under £4 for a burger, then it will be a bad idea and you will die inside when you end up in such a place as I did yesterday.

But this is a brave blog, I am a brave blogger who will brave the horrors of McDonalds for my readers.  You are my readership and I doing this for you.

Here are a few facts about McDonalds (thanks businessinsider.com).

1.       If you go anywhere in the world, you will ultimately fall over a McDonalds at some point (that’s one of my facts).

2.       McDonalds sells more than 75 burgers every second internationally.

3.       Its $24 billion revenue makes it the 90^th largest economy in the world.

4.       The Queen of England owns a McDonald’s near Buckingham Palace as part of her vast real estate portfolio

It is a cultural phenomenon, more than just a business.  It has even slipped in to our language with the ‘Mc’ prefix stuck on the beginning of things to insinuate a cheap and mass produced quality. (McJob, McMansion etc…) and to boot, recently Jamie Oliver dubbed McDonalds meat unfit for human consumption so really, yeah…ammonia flavoured, yummy.

McDonalds in Exeter is a focal point for foreign tourists, teenagers and dopes like me who need something very cheap and very quick.  This is what they do best, and no matter how you look at it McDonalds is at the top of their game.

Standing in the queue, (and there is always a queue) is like waiting in some dystopian nightmare where you are about to be handed out your dystopian meal to sit at your dystopian seating area waiting to be dragged away by guards for reeducation.  Thankfully that hasn't happened to me (yet) but this tends to be the overiding feeling.  The service can vary between friendly, apathetic and downright impatient, they can have 5 stars on their badge, 1 star or no stars.  Each time I come here I seem to get a different member of staff, so the argument for cloning McDonalds staff is wearing thin here.

I have to say the taste of what is generally handed to me or thrown at me, is not bad.  The New York Burger which is one of their themed burgers which comes out once a year or so, is actually quite nice.  I know the chemicals have been balanced perfectly, I know it is the result of many hours of R&D, but if they have invested millions of dollars to get the reaction of "hmm this isn't that bad" from me, then they have succeeded. For 40p more you can also have Crispy Potato Things which are like small round waffles made of potato.  Alas there are really not many of them, so yes, not quite as good a value.

The Saver Double Cheese Burger is roughly the same.  Small, squat, thinly garnished with 'stuff' but not inedible.  At £1.50 the 'Below £4.00 and it tastes bad rule' still applies, but this is nicer than other cheap-assed burgers.  I even got two pickled gherkin slices...lucky me.

In conclusion.  I keep finding the McDonalds surprises me with stuff that doesn't taste that bad, but I know it is all an illusion.