Burger King Garlic Meat Beast and Garlic Quatro Cheese (product information)

Click this image to load a bigger one.

Sometimes, I'd see a funky shirt in Japan and I'd think the person who wrote the Engrish on it just had to know that it was on the pervy side. Can someone name anything "meat beast" and not know what it sounds like? I don't like burgers and I don't eat fast food, but I'd have my husband buy this burger and try it (as he likes both garlic and meat) for no other reason than its name. I guess that makes this pretty good marketing whether they are aware of the connotations the English carries or not.

The beast has a chicken patty in addition to the beef and the quattro cheese has beef, a hash brown patty and four types of cheese - colby jack, two kinds of cheese sauce, and cheddar. All in all, they sound pretty decadent. 

McDonald's Squid and Tomato Italian Risotto Balls (product information)

Image from McDonald's Japan

I have never wanted to put quotes around something as much as the word "Italian" in the title of this post. I'm sure that there is nothing Italian about wrapping risotto infused with either tomato or squid around cheese and deep frying it. This abomination is part of McDonald's way of celebrating one of the world's most popular sports. There is no greater way to tip your hat to feats of athleticism than to eat fried balls of cheese and risotto. 

Pizza Hut and Morinaga Milk Caramel Pizza (product announcement)

The Japanese have to show that they can take anything America does and do it better. They've finally turned their attention toward the excess which is "dessert pizza". Given the enormous task involved in taking something as sacred as putting sugary delights on pizza dough, Pizza Hut decided to combine its research forces with that at Morinaga, a company known well for it's caramel delights.

As you can see by the ad, the pizza costs 800 yen (about $8) and is topped with "colorful marshmallows", almonds, and caramel sauce. It is 25 cm. (about 10 in.) in size. This monstrosity became available on June 10 and will be making new cavities for a limited time. You can have it delivered to you, but only if you buy at least 1400 yen worth of food at the same time.

Mosdo Box (promotional information)

Image from Mosdo - click this image to see a larger one with more detail.

I'm a fan of balancing things out when I eat, but some people really like to stay with the same theme. For me, if I have pizza, I want to have a salad on the side as a way of balancing the nutrition. I don't like to have, say, fried cheese sticks. Cheese plus cheese is not my thing. I'm not criticizing those who enjoy such pairings, but, simply saying that they are not for me.

If you are someone who likes to layer on the fatty food all together, then the happy marriage of Mos Burger and Mister Donut has something you might like. For a 2,500 yen (about $25), you can get 4 pieces of Mos chicken (breaded and deep-fired, onion rings and French fires plus 4 donuts and a couple of Mosdo mugs for your coffee. I suggest you make that coffee black and let that be the only thing you drink the next day after chowing down on this fat fest. 

KFC Colonel Saunders for Children's Day (promotional information)

Image courtesy of KFC Japan. Click to load a larger version. 

May 5 was "children's day" in Japan. It is one of the holidays celebrated during "Golden Week" in Japan. As part of the celebration, KFC Japan dressed the Colonel statues in warrior garb at various locations. Given the range of costumes that I have seen on the statue, I have to wonder if there is a storage room in every branch which houses his wardrobe or if these things are rented for the day and then sent back. Between Santa and witches costumes and traditional Japanese holidays, old Colonel Saunders has a bigger wardrobe than I do.

Incidentally, if you have a thing for old Southern Colonels and you'd like to put one on your desktop, KFC has a couple of pictures you can make your computer background. You can get them here.

McDonald's Sakura Burger

Recently, I conducted a Skype lesson with one of my former face to face students from Japan. She pointed out to me that my picture for Skype was the McDonald's Sakura burger. I told her that it was an ancient picture that I really should change. The reason I put it up there was that I had the picture on my desktop, likely for this blog (though I think I never used it). My student pointed out that this burger was being re-released, so I checked it out and, it is back (released March 21).

The burger is supposed to have a "faint cherry scent" and you can see that the bun has some pink in it. The meat is a pork patty and it includes teriyaki sauce and an egg (it's called sakura teri tama - cherry teriyaki egg). The sauce is mayonnaise based and also includes ginger. Frankly, it all sounds like a real mess of flavors which probably don't have a good chance of meshing. I wouldn't touch this burger with a ten-foot-pole, but then I wouldn't touch any fast food burger. If you give this a try, let me know if all of the flavors play nice together.

Cryptic Burger King Ad (product announcement)

Burger King Japan has released this rather cryptic ad with accompany text that says, "coming soon". One can only guess at the monstrosity that may be related to it. The statue is eating a burger and the apple appears to be stuffed with lettuce and bacon. It could be that they're going to have a burger which contains apples or uses apples instead of bread for a bun. However, chances are that this is a far more boring item and that the apple refers to "The Big Apple" (as does the Stature of Liberty) and that we're going to be seeing something called a "New York" burger released on January 28.

Any guesses from my readers as to what would make for a New York burger or what this ad might mean?

Fast Food Christmas deals 2013 (product information)

Image courtesy of Domino's Pizza, Japan.

When you think Christmas dinner, you think of chain pizza places, right? Well, you would if you were in Japan - at least you would as a second thought after you found out that your local KFC no longer had any open slots for Christmas dinner meal reservations. They're the second line of defense in a country which doesn't give anyone the day off for holiday meal preparation. You'd look to fast food, too, if you had to try and pull a "special" meal together after a long day on the job. Domino's is offering the tasty-looking specimen above. It looks big and juicy, doesn't it? Well, if you view it in context, it's not so much a half "chicken" as a "half pigeon".

To understand just how tiny this is, you have to bear in mind that a "large" pizza in Japan is no bigger than and sometimes slightly smaller than a "medium" in the U.S. That is, it was about 12" (25 cm.) in diameter. You can get a Christmas dinner set including this half Cornish game hen with a salad, Coke, and a tiny cake for 4,900 ($47) or 5,900 yen ($57).

Pizza Hut is not to be left our. If you reserve the day before you want the order received, and between Dec. 21 and Dec. 25, and you spend at least 3,000 yen ($29) on your pizza, potatoes, and whatever else is in your fast food meal, you can get the above cake as a "present". The cake is 12 cm. (4.8 in.), so you've getting an itty bitty little thing, but at least it's free!

I checked out the last, and most popular, of the triumvarate of pizza chains in Japan. That would be Pizza-la, and, apparently, they want nothing to do with this Christmas nonsense and don't appear to be making any special offers. I guess they do well enough with their regular Japan-style offerings as well as things like their New Zealand pizza (cheddar cheese, cheddar sauce, chicken, mayonnaise, thick-cut bacon, onion, tomato, and parsley).

Of course, the "grandaddy" Christmas deal in Japan is KFC. They are offering their standard Christmas deal for 3,980 yen/$38 (pictured above) and it includes a medium-size commemorative plate. Note that this plate design, is very similar to the 2010 design on the one my husband and I got during our one and only KFC holiday celebration. It's a little different (people around a tree instead of around a merry-go-round), but similar enough that I confused them on first glance.

Happy Christmas Eve to my readers. This is actually my favorite day as the moment of anticipation is always better than the moment of any sort of reveal. I hope you all have a good one!

McDonald's Chicken Egg McMuffin (product information)

Do your remember making lists of desert island objects when you were a kid? That was what you did before you made lists of desert island songs and books as a teenager. In such lists, you'd think about what you'd need to survive and use those ten items to make a nuclear reactor out of a coconut so that you could live in style in exile.

McToast is sad toast. It's what you'd make at home if you were out of bread and had nothing but stale burger buns to work with.

Sometimes it feels like fast food places are working with the same limits. They have a short list of food stuffs and they keep juggling the mix around to create "new" menu items. This breakfast option from McDonald's Japan feels like a dance card shuffled into the wrong place. It is their fried chicken patty added to an Egg McMuffin. I guess that someone at corporate asked, "what do we have that we haven't swapped into the morning menu?" Still, it's less pathetic than the "McToast" option. That's a burger bun flipped around so that the inside is toasted and filled with ham (Canadian bacon) and cheese.

This probably seems less strange in Japan than it would in America. They already have hot dogs on their regular morning menu there and it is a culture which includes fish and rice as part of its traditional breakfast. To me though, fried chicken, even in the form of a patty of pressed meat, is just "wrong" for breakfast. I'm guessing it's pretty good though if you're hungover, as no small number of businessmen are inclined to be.

Burking King BiKing is back

Burger King conducts an annual campaign which can be very confusing to those who aren't familiar with the ins and outs of Japanese spelling and pronunciation of various letters as well as their unique term for "all you can eat." When an English speaker reads only the English on this ad, it may appear that they're dealing with people who ride bikes or that the king has decided that his door swings both ways.

The reason this is written as "BiKing" is that "Viking" in Japan means "all you can eat" and the sound of "b" and "v" is a problem for most Japanese listeners when it comes to English. From 2:00-11:00 PM, customers can buy a set and for 30 minutes, they can have any component of it (onion rings or fries, drink, burger) refilled. If you're caught trying to take out leftovers (absolutely no take-out on this deal) or sharing with others, you will have to put on a creepy King mask and stand outside the shop with a sandwich board admitting your crime. Okay, that's a big, fat lie. We all know that most Japanese would rather die than die of embarrassment admitting that they tried to weasel free grub out of the King. If you cheat on the deal, you have to pay for each component separately.

This is an interesting campaign (which started on November 15) because it allows people to have all you can eat on potentially high value items like a burger. However, given the 30-minute time limit and the fact that most Japanese people are not capable of hogging down a ton of food at once - barring the competitive eaters out there - this is probably a money maker for Burger King rather than a loser. 

MOS Rice Burgers (product information)

MOS Burger has been offering rice burgers in Japan for quite some time, but their web site talks about how hard it has been for them to substitute the burger bun for a slab of rice that doesn't fall apart when you eat it. From my limited experience, I can say that when we ordered such rice burgers, the rice did tend to crumble sooner, if not later.

Their current press claims that they have found a way to fix this problem and they're offering up some interesting burgers to boot (all images courtesy of MOS Burger):

mackeral miso burger:

colorful sauteed vegetable burger:

fried seafood burger:

curry rice burger (with pork patty and ketchup sauce):

egg burger with soy sauce:

The egg burger is part of their morning offering, and, yes, you can order the miso soup as well!

This is the sort of "esoteric" junk food in Japan that I'd like to see make its way over here, but I know it never well. 

Burger King "King's Harvest" Burgers (product information)

It's interesting that America is always tagged for its large-size offerings - especially when it comes to things that are unhealthy like fast food - but Japan is the place that has sold monster burgers and giant kakigori (shaved ice). For the record, the kakigori in the linked video isn't nearly the biggest one I've seen shown on T.V. It's just one that I found an easy connection to showing.

The "King's Harvest" burgers, released on September 27 in Japan, include a "big bacon whopper" which has what looks like a strip of bacon the was carved from the full length of a whole piglet. The more modest sandwich on the right is a BK bolognese and includes, unsurprisngly, bolognese sauce. Both also include a hash brown patty. This is to make sure that, if you were worried about consuming sufficient carbohydrates and saturated fat, that you have nothing to worry about.

It's interesting that these are called "King's Harvest". Presumably, a "harvest" means plants. Unless those plants happen to be potatoes, there's little about these that says "harvest" and more that saws "slaughter". Though I wouldn't try this if I were in Japan now, my husband said that he would try the bacon burger. However, he'd take out the hash brown patty and eat it separately.

KFC Smile Set (product information)

Images courtesy of KFC Japan.

Anything in Japan can be "chibified". That is, it can be made cute and adorable like Rilakkuma or Hello Kitty. This includes deceased purveyors of greasy fried chicken who, heretofore, were mainly represented in statuary.

Making the colonel, who seemed to be born near-sighted, white-haired and with a goatee, into a little cutie-pie is one of the best ways to get kids interested in buying KFC's "smile set". If that's not enough, then they'll give away little prizes with the meal sets (shown at the top) as illustrated above. The top item is a "cooking board" which, near as I can tell, is about cutting straight (hence the measurement marks at the bottom). I'm guessing it is not anything as solid as a cutting board. The second item is a "hand towel". Those are usually the size and shape of a diminutive handkerchief and meant to be carried around for drying ones hands after using public restrooms that have neither towels nor electronic dryers. The third item is a "recipe memo", because kids are always writing down recipes. Finally, there is a "deco sheet" which you can use to decorate your cakes.

The strange thing about these to me is that they don't seem very "kid" oriented. While you can get your choice of one of these if you buy one of the two "smile sets", they definitely seem that they're for young women, not for kids. How many kids do you know who are decorating cakes using stencils?

At any rate, if you have found yourself in love with the crooked-nosed chibi Colonel and would like to adorn your desktop with his adorable little image, you can download a wallpaper of him here. 

KFC Corn Potage Fritter (product announcement)

Images courtesy of KFC Japan.

KFC Japan is starting to sell a "corn potage" fritter today. It is the closest I've seen in Japan to someone deep-frying a liquid a la deep fried beer or Coke as are often sold at fairs and festivals in the U.S. The outside is supposed to be crispy. The inside is likely going to be some sort of flavored mashed potato with corn kernels. It'll be a carb-o-rama, but I bet it'll be good in a bad way.

As an addendum to this KFC-related announcement, I noticed recently that the biscuits in Japan are different than they are here. They come with a hole in the center like a donut. They also are sold with honey-maple syrup, which I'm not sure you get packets of here in the U.S. I think this is a little reflection of a cultural difference because the biscuits here are seen as a bland accompaniment to the meal whereas they're almost considered a dessert in Japan. Certainly they are tender and flaky enough in Japan to qualify. One of my former Australian colleagues refused to call it a "biscuit" and insisted that it was a scone. Arguments that it was called a "biscuit" in the food's country of origin as well as in katakana Japanese fell on deaf ears. 

Mos Burger Choux Pot Shakes

Image from Mos Burger.

The "Choux Pot Shake" sounds like it would be a great name for a dance. Perhaps some wordplay could even be used such that one stuck a foot in a flower pot and attempted to shake it off a la "shoe pot shake". Okay, maybe not so much, but it'd be very entertaining for bystanders to watch a bunch of people on the disco floor pantomime trying to dislodge a stuck pot from their foot.

This type of choux is the French kind rather than the type that you shod your feet with and such desserts have been popular in Japan for a very long time. You can buy simple ones with either whipped cream, custard or a mixture of both in most convenience stores and markets. For something with such an upscale feel, it is decidedly common and available as a mass market item. I used to buy a tray with 9-12 tiny little one-bite ones at Lawson 100 (for 100 yen/$1.03, of course) on occasion so I could nosh on one without having to cram one of the giant ones into my cakehole.

Since they are so common, it's no surprise that a fast food place like Mos Burger would get in on the gig. For 380 yen ($3.90), you get a mug lined with choux pastry with custard and either a vanilla, coffee or strawberry shake.  It's on the expensive side, but you do get to keep the coffee cup (and don't we all need more coffee cups) as well as have the sense that you're a cut above the ignorant rabble with their plain old shakes in paper cups, sucking at their dessert through a straw like a plebeian.

If you'd like to set your computer up like a plebeian, Mos Burger has wallpapers for you here.

Variety Friday: The McDonald's 60-second campaign

There are a lot of characteristics which, in general, define the Japanese psyche. One of them is their appreciation and value of aesthetics. Often, it is the case that how something looks plays a major role in whether or not it will be purchased. I even complained about how sweets in Japan often look great, but taste less appealing because of this experience. This focus on aesthetics is why you get a lot of wrapping on some purchases and clerks will glacially slowly and painstakingly place things in bags and boxes for you.

There's also a certain expectation among the Japanese that they will get what they see. All of that plastic food outside of shops tends to be amazingly accurate representations of what you are served. Granted, McDonald's is not a "restaurant" in any true sense of the word, but even fast food in Japan tends to look similar to what is in pictures. Perhaps it's all a bit flatter and grayer, but it's not a sloppy mess. Things have apparently changed.

Another fairly well known attribute is patience. Japanese people line up and wait in long queues without pushing, shoving, or complaining. It's not that they are never in a hurry, but rather that they understand that sometimes there's no choice but to wait and the overwhelming majority do so with good grace and stoicism, if not gentle good humor.

Given these fairly well known and oft-displayed characteristics, I have to ask, "what was McDonald's Japan thinking" when they came up with the 60-second campaign. They even put a timer on the counter to allow customers to track the speed of delivery of their order in order to up the capacity to monitor employees. For those who haven't read about it, as of January 4, the golden arches in Japan promised to make your burger in a minute or less or they'd give you a coupon for a free burger (and everyone gets a free brewed coffee coupon). The internet is abuzz with stories of sloppy results and complaints from customers who would rather have things right than fast. 

Before anyone thinks this is a transference of American-style shoddy service to Japan, I'd like to point out that the Japanese run their own show in this regard. One of the reasons why it has been so successful despite offering Western-style cuisine is that the head honchos tend to do a pretty good job when it comes to tapering menu choices and marketing toward Japanese people. They retool the shakes so they are less sweet but fattier. They offer limited edition seasonal menu items that fit the ebb and flow of tastes in Japan (like sakura shakes in spring). The people in charge are not dumb. They know their market and generally make good choices. So, what is this all about?

Though I cannot know, I have some suspicions and they are based on the growth strategies that McDonald's Japan is emphasizing. One of their goals for the coming year is to create a "gold standard" for drive-through service and to optimize profits by focusing on larger operations. While I cannot know for certain, it's not too great of a leap in logic to believe that faster service is a part of both of these plans. McDonald's has been and plans to continue to strategically close smaller places and focus on larger ones. If you were going into such a big fast food joint and saw a long line, wouldn't you be more inclined to wait during your limited lunch hour if you had confidence that each customer could be served in a minute? You could literally count how long you'd have to wait. The same goes for the drive-through service. 

I think this campaign was about two things, and I'm pretty sure it isn't going to succeed on either front. One was training staff to push themselves to the limit on speed during peak service hours (note that the campaign operates between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm, prime lunch hour range for most people). The other possible goal would be to create confidence in consumers that they would get served promptly and well during rush hours even if they were at a location that was somewhat swamped with customers. 

Besides focusing on the drive-through business and eliminating small stores in favor of larger ones, McDonald's plans on acquiring prime real estate in areas with a high commercial promise. It makes sense to assume that they hope to buy a good chunk of land in an area which has a high potential for massive numbers of customers and to erect large shops there. This makes fiscal sense because small places serving under-patronized areas can't be nearly as profitable. However, we all know that the little places tend to give better service, both in terms of quality and speed, because employees aren't harried and swamped. Once again, one can speculate that this campaign could work as a warm up for service at very large new locations. 

It's also possible that this is as stupid and ill-advised as it looks. Perhaps this is just a PR campaign which someone concocted for some quick attention without regard to the Japanese market's concerns or the insane pressure it would put on employees. It's also possible that the management bigwigs at McDonald's Japan are just too clever for the rest of this and they  have an ace up their sleeve that will pull all of this together into a happy ending. I guess time will tell. 

McDonald's Japan International Burgers (product info.)

I'm on the fence about how I feel about fast food places incorporating what appear to be higher class ingredients into their offerings. On the one hand, it's kind of nice that they want to mix things up a bit. On the other, they almost always dumb things down in such a way that they're not really all that one might expect. I've read far too many reviews of sauces which are little more than mayonnaise mixed with some core ingredient to simulate an international flavor without straying too far from what a pedestrian palate will tolerate. We want our fast food to be only marginally more interesting than what we're used to because nobody goes to McDonald's for adventurous cuisine, not even the Japanese, who generally will tolerate a wider flavor range than the average American. 

In the case of McDonald's international burger options, they're offering the following:

All images from the McDonald's Japan web site.

Le Grand Tomato:

A beef patty on ciabatta bread (which is Italian, not French, right?) with mozzarella cheese (again, Italian), gravy, butter sauce, lettuce and tomato. This burger seems slightly more on the international side, or at least it suffers from a bit of a nationality identity crisis.

Le Gran Sausage:

A beef patty on ciabatta bread with mozzarella, mustard sauce, and sausage (German?) with the requisite lettuce and tomato.

These sandwiches are currently available and were introduced on July 18. 

Hot Gold Masala:

A bun topped with cornmeal houses a crispy chicken patty with tomato, lettuce, onion, cheese, and a spicy curry sauce.

Mild Gold Masala:

This is the same bun with a mild curry sauce flavored with honey and a mayo chutney. What was that I said about the special sauces just being something mixed with mayo?  However, McDonald's recommends this for chili wusses. (These sandwiches haven't been introduced yet and will be available from August 2.)

Aussie Deli:

Aussie beef pastrami on a bun that has been steamed to plump it up. Yellow mustard, possibly with stone ground seeds, is added to boost the flavor profile.

Cheese Aussie Deli:
The same as the aforementioned sandwich, but, with, you know, a slice of cheese. (These sandwiches haven't been introduced yet and will be available from August 3.)

Chicken nuggets with basil sauce:

Your favorite chicken-like product with mayonnaise mixed with basil. (Introduced on July 18 and currently available.)

Chicken nuggets with curry sauce:

And the same thing mixed with curry. I must admit that I would actually buy this if they served the nuggets on a silver tray as pictured here. (To be introduced in August)

Any time that an international version of any food is introduced, it's a reflection of a foreign country's perception of another country's cuisine as well as their own tastes. In America, anything labeled "French" which is not a fry would be served on a croissant or a baguette. In Japan, I'm guessing ciabatta bread is the closest they can come to something which isn't a regular burger bun which is easy to store and handle (and cheap to produce). The inclusion of sausage and mozzarella cheese on the French sandwich mystifies me, but I am a dumb American with little exposure to true French cuisine. It's all butter, long loaves of crusty goodness, cold potato soup, and pastries to me. For all I know, mozzarella is the national cheese of France (though I would've expected it to be brie) and they are sausage sucking fiends (read into that what you like).

The Australian option reminds me of Arby's, except without the American beef option. As I've mentioned before, the whole mad cow scare was amplified to the point where the dial was definitely at "11" in Japan so the local consumers don't feel comfortable with cows that were born in the U.S.A. The Fukushima situation has them none too thrilled with the idea of native beef, but they have strong confidence in not being somehow poisoned by cows that like to add a "y" to the end of most of their words (choccy, prezzy, grundies, etc.).

All in all, I would not be compelled to buy fast food because of these new options, though if I already had a hankering for something, I might try one of these out. If I were even slightly tempted, I'd want to try the hot gold masala, if only because it sounds like slang for a disgusting sex act. ;-)

Random Picture #74

My husband and I sometimes enjoy just picking a station which has little fame associated with it and just wander around the area to see what pops up of interest. Sometimes, we find something delightful and, at others, we find that the lack of a reputation is well-deserved. One of the places we went to was Tachikawa, a relatively big place with relatively little to recommend itself to us personally. It was mainly populated by various soft gambling establishments (pachinko and slots). It did have this burger joint, which had a name which caught my fancy. It's not especially strange, except for the fact that it implies there is only one burger and you have finally located it.

Random Picture 47

 Click this to see a bigger one that you can read better.

This sign is from Becker's, a fast food place that is either owned or has an exclusive deal with Japan Railway (JR). In some stations, you can find these places though only in some of the bigger ones that aren't already surrounded by other fast food options. As fast food goes, they're at least a small cut above the rest. Like Subway, they bake their own bread (buns) on the premises and claim to make everything fresh. I used to work near Itabashi station and they had a Becker's, but my local station does not.

This poster is for breakfast options at a Becker's at a neighboring station and it caught my eye for several reasons. First of all, the presentation on the sign is very elegant for fast food. Since I didn't actually eat there, I can't say for sure, but I believe that the food is served on actual plates. The sets are:

"Morning Plate 1" - scrambled egg, toast with butter, and a scrap of bacon with coffee
"Morning Plate 2" - this is called the "balance plate" which includes everything in the first set (egg, bacon, toast, coffee) plus yogurt and juice
"Morning Plate 3" - a hot dog, yes, a hot dog and a few scraps of lettuce and tomato with coffee
"Morning Plate 4" -  coffee, toast with cheese or mayo with various goo (can't tell which and the poster doesn't say), coffee, and a thimble of cabbage
"Morning Plate 5" - English muffin halves with scrambled egg and ketchup and seaweed, cheese and bacon, and coffee


The configuration of these sets illustrates something about Japanese food culture which one can either find charming or irritating, and that's that the equivalent of gustatory lip service when it comes to the sides. The amount of vegetables is so minuscule as to be pretty much pointless. They function more as garnish than as meal components.

Variety Friday: Japanese KFC Christmas

The barrel was quite huge, about the volume of a 5 gallon bucket. 

Despite living in Japan for over 20 years, my husband and I have never taken part in the traditional fried chicken and Christmas cake rituals that have somehow become a part of the Japanese Christmas tradition. I'm not certain of how this tradition began, but I would be surprised if it weren't the devil spawn of the KFC marketing department. They are the kings of this ritual, though a wide variety of other outlets, including convenience stores and other fast food places, have jumped on the fried chicken bandwagon around this time of year.

The reservation schedule posted at our local KFC. The top shows the menu options for Christmas packs/barrels. The yellow tags indicate limited availability of chicken during those hours and the orange tags are hours in which no original recipe chicken will be on offer. You can see that 3:00 pm - 9:00 pm on the 24th is the busiest. (Click this to see a bigger version.)

While it may seem that having KFC for Christmas is just a simple matter of strolling on over to the local greasy chicken outlet and picking up a bucket, it's a bit more complicated than that because of the popularity of getting chicken during "the 3 days of Christmas" in Japan. At least in Tokyo, you have to make an effort to sign up early in order to pick your grub up around dinner time on the 23rd, 24th or 25th. If you don't, you risk getting shut out entirely as they can run out of original recipe chicken. Also, there can be huge mobs of people on the 25th and it's hard to get what you want by mere luck.

My husband and I signed up a few weeks before the date, but even then we were too late to hit any of the sweet spots for dinner on Christmas Eve or Day. We had to settle for the 23rd, which happens to be a national holiday (the Emperor's birthday) in Japan. You choose a time to pick up your chicken at 10-minute intervals. Ours was between 6:30-6:40. If you're late, you still get your chicken, but it will have sat around for awhile. Since you have to pay when you make your reservation, they don't care if you show up or not.

 The bucket contents unpacked.

There are a few different options, but we opted for the "party barrel A" for 3,880 yen ($47) because you get a commemorative plate in addition to a "Christmas salad", Christmas cake, and 8 pieces of original recipe chicken. The other options include the "party barrel B" (4 pieces of chicken, 6 tenders, a salad, a cake and the plate for the same price as "A"), and "Christmas Packs" which include only various types of chicken (tenders, nuggets, and pieces), no salad, no cake, and no plate. My husband wanted to get the plate as part of the deal as a memento of our first "Japanese-style" Christmas meal, but we also figured that this would save us having to arrange for a separate cake.

The whole lot served up, save the cake. That's our rice. It doesn't come with your barrel.

Except for the cake, nothing much was going to be a surprise. Everyone knows what original recipe KFC tastes like. The "Christmas salad" was nothing more than a smallish bit of salad with a Caesar salad kit on the side. What was worse was that the salad was mostly iceberg lettuce. Again, this was no great shock, but it would have been nice if they had done a little better by those buying expensive Christmas barrels. The salad kit had dressing, croutons, bacon bits, Parmesan cheese, and 4 plastic forks. The salad portion was barely adequate for 2. If you had 4 people, it would have been obscenely tiny.

The cake was very soft and I had a little trouble getting it out of the package without denting up the soft chocolate topping. When my husband smelled it, he said it was very reminiscent of something and asked me what I thought. My first thought was chocolate pudding, and that was his thought as well. The cake looks like your usual Japanese Christmas cake in that it has little flecks of real gold in the center to add a touch of elegance.

The cake was largely whipped cream based. The super soft outer layer was slightly bittersweet and where most of the flavor lay. The texture was pretty nice, but I would have liked a bit more heft both in terms of the flavor and density of the cake. The cake itself nearly vanished in a melty cloud of cream. It wasn't bad, but wasn't nearly as good as the cake I was given last year, not by a long shot. On the bright side, the cake was about 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter and provided 4 large pieces or 8 small ones. My husband and I each had 1/8, and that weighed in at a mere 90 calories per serving.

This was an interesting experience, but mainly for going through the process of reserving it, picking it up, and seeing what the surprises might be. All in all though, it wasn't a very good meal, but I'm not a fan of fast food in general and KFC in particular. I ate one piece of the chicken only and the rest my husband will have to slowly eat by himself. If you love KFC and want a plate as a souvenir to remember your time in Japan by, this may be worthwhile, but I wouldn't do this again.

I have to ponder why this is so popular in Japan despite being a decidedly so-so experience on the food front. It's certainly not cheap. In fact, you could probably buy all of the components separately and end up with more money left in your pocket. The plate isn't really even a free bonus and you could definitely get a nicer cake, even from a convenience store. I think that this ultimately is like a lot of Western traditions in that we don't do them because they are good but simply because they are familiar and following this custom puts one in the proper spirit for  the holiday. Many Japanese people eat bad fried chicken for Christmas for the same reason that we still give fruitcakes. It's just what is done by everyone and we try not to think too deeply about why we do it.

Merry Christmas to all of my readers!