The Big Arch

The Arch Burger, then. A towering monument to corporate overreach and our collective willingness to be seduced by social media into believing a bigger burger is somehow a better one. McDonald’s latest stab at culinary reinvention or more accurately, reinvention of our wallets, is less a burger than an edible billboard, a walking advert for itself that leaves little room for actual taste.

But first, a little historical amuse-bouche. In the mid-90s, McDonald’s unveiled the Arch Deluxe, a monumentally misguided attempt to civilise the burger, making it grown-up, sophisticated, with its potato-flour bun and something called “Dijonnaise” designed by a chef who probably now wakes up screaming at the memory. Children were shown turning up their noses at it in commercials. Adults did much the same, only more discreetly and with the added sting of having paid for it. By 2000, the Arch Deluxe was left to die quietly, joining the pantheon of fast-food flops that marketing execs prefer not to discuss at parties.

Fast forward to now, and McDonald’s has rummaged about in its dusty archive of failed ideas and resurrected the concept, rebadged it as the “Big Arch,” and lobbed it at the gaping maws of Britain and Ireland. This one’s pitched not at your refined palate but at your basest appetites. Two hulking patties, something north of 14 ounces, white cheddar, lettuce, pickles, crispy onions, raw onions, and a sauce that is probably more a legal liability than a culinary achievement.

We took ours home, a polite way of saying we were unwilling to risk the public spectacle of wrestling it into our faces. The seeded brioche bun had the structural integrity of damp cardboard, slipping and sliding about like tectonic plates mid-earthquake. You need hands like a docker to keep it from dismantling itself.

As for taste? Well, the onions — raw and crispy — staged a coup, ousting any whisper of that much-vaunted Dijonnaise or indeed anything else. The beef was perfectly pleasant, in the sense that it was recognisably beef, but after a few bites the whole affair became a sort of relentless onion parade, one that felt less like dinner and more like penance.

It’s not a disaster, merely another monument to McDonald’s enduring faith that if you make something large enough, people will buy it at least once. They will. We did. But let’s not pretend this is anything more than an oversized gimmick. Really, they ought to rename it the Onion Monolith and have done with it.