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When McDonald’s Japan announced recently a rolling set of new menu items based on supposedly classic American recipes, the majority of the Internet – recalling how awesome the Big America series was – collectively foodgasmed in anticipation.

Unfortunately, now that the first items are finally here, consumer reviews have viciously skewered the new “Classic Fries with Cheese,” with comments ranging from, “This is unpleasant” to “This tastes like sloth pee.” Questions of how some Netizens know what sloth pee tastes like aside, it’s safe to conclude opinions are widely divided. So, of course, fast food connoisseurs that we are, we had to try the item for ourselves and throw our hat into the public debate ring.

Here are our impressions:

The cheese is pretty gross

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The first thing you notice about these new fries is that they’re served disassembled and you need to put them together yourself, squirting the cheese sauce on and topping with a meager helping of “bacon analogue flakes.” The second thing you notice is that the sauce comes out a lot like clumpy, barf-colored silly string, which you might recognize as a physical property cheese really shouldn’t have. It also doesn’t taste all that great, with a flavor and consistency that resembles an unholy hybrid of margarine and mayonnaise.

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The bacon tastes like nothing

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After the cheese sauce goes the bacon-ish flakes, which are apparently freeze-dried bacon bits. On their own, they taste like freeze-dried bacon, which isn’t bad because, you know, bacon. But when eaten along with the rest of the dish, the strong flavor of the cheese goo totally overwhelms the helpless bits and causes them to taste like little more than crunchy air.

They go cold much faster than regular fries

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Finally rounding out the unholy trinity of reasons why this definitely isn’t McDonald’s Japan’s best idea in a while is the fact that the fries demonstrably go cold about twice as fast as the regular fries. For comparison, we purchased a box of regular fries to accompany the new ones and, sure enough, the regular fries were still piping hot long after the cheese fries had gone cold and limp. We presume this is because they’re spread out flat in a special box and thus are more exposed to air, but we’ll leave that for those wily scientists to prove; the only science we know is the science of stuffing food into our faces.

So, what’s our final verdict on McDonald’s new Classic Fries with Cheese? Well, while we’d stop short of comparing it to sloth pee – mainly because we don’t want to have to drink sloth pee – we can safely say we probably won’t be ordering these again, opting instead for the standard fries. Still, everyone’s tastes are different and you might end up enjoying this new experiment from McDonald’s, so brave souls are invited to try it for themselves and let us know how they felt in the comments.

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Images: RocketNews24
[ Read in Japanese ]