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fast food (Page 39)

McDonald’s attempts to lure back customers with open kitchen concept in Japan

It’s no secret that McDonald’s Japan has been on a slippery slope following several food safety scandals in recent years. In 2014, the fast food giant reported its first annual loss in 11 years, which amounted to 21.84 billion yen (around US$176 million).

In an effort to restore trust and reaffirm their commitment to quality assurance, the fast food chain recently fitted out two stores in Japan with an “open kitchen” design, allowing customers to get an inside view of operations to see just how orders are made, from start to finish.

But will this be enough to bring customers back to the golden arches?

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Lotteria wins us over with two amazing new potato chip burgers

Lotteria Japan has done it again. Just when we thought nothing could beat their ramen noodle burgers, they bring out these little beauties. No more dreaming of salty, crunchy potato chips smothered in sauce and stuffed inside your favourite burger because Lotteria has finally made our dreams a reality!

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New fried take on Yoshinoya’s original beef bowl really hits the spot! 【Recipe】

For those looking for a quick and cheap meal in Japan, beef bowls, or gyudon, from fast food chains like Yoshinoya are a great option for both your stomach and your wallet. While in the past we’ve shown you how to make your own Yoshinoya-style beef bowl, odds are if you’re a regular patron of the famous chain or others like it, you probably aren’t that handy in the kitchen.

Still, every now and then people like a change of pace, or they find themselves trying to impress guests with a home-cooked meal. Luckily we have a fried Yoshinoya beef bowl recipe that fits that bill, and best of all it doesn’t require much of your effort or time, granted you have a Yoshinoya nearby.

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McDonald’s opens fancy pop-up restaurant in Tokyo for one night only

Around the world, fast food chain McDonald’s prides itself on its trademark menu, designed to feed the needs of busy customers on the go.

For one night only, though, the giant company will slow down the pace by taking a step into luxury dining, with a special multi-course meal that includes a platter of patties, a vichyssoise made from French fries and a gelée made with McDonald’s vegetables.

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Who needs bread when you have fried chicken? Try all of your comfort foods revamped by KFC

Does anyone out there still adhere to the low-carb diet? You know, the one where you have to give up all sorts of bread-y goodness under the presumption that carbohydrates make you fat, and that upping the protein in your diet would somehow help you to lose weight? Well, if you’re in to that sort of torture, fast food chain KFC may have something for you, as stores worldwide have put out various twists on old favorites by replacing burger and hot dog buns with chicken, and now KFCs in the Philippines are upping the game with their new, extremely limited crustless chicken pizza.

And sorry, low-carbers, we lied. As breaded, deep-fried chicken isn’t exactly a proper alternative, you may want to turn away now to avoid temptation. Everyone else, you may proceed to the wonder that is the “Chizza“.

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Korea’s Mexicana Chicken offers fried chicken in strawberry, banana, and melon flavors

On 5 July, Korean chicken restaurant Mexicana Chicken unveiled their new selection of “Stoplight Chicken” which are small pieces of boneless chicken coated in flavored powders colored red, yellow, and green.

Apparently emboldened by the previous success of chicken nuggets coated in cheese powder, Mexicana has decided to go all out and add strawberry, banana, and melon to the available flavors for their fried chicken. However, according to online reaction, the result is not great.

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Burger King Japan unleashes red burgers and Angry Sauce on my stomach 【Taste test】

When Burger King Japan first brought out its black burgers, more than a few people were shocked, and even a little intimidated, by their sinister appearance. After diners got over their fear and tried them, though, they discovered they were pretty tasty, and they’ve now become a welcomed, sporadically appearing item on the chain’s menu.

Seeing how well that gamble played out, Burger King has decided to spin the roulette wheel once again, but this time they’re betting on red with two new sandwiches with crimson buns and cheese. So how do they taste? We decided to grab the pair and try them for ourselves.

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Mr. Sato travels the distance to try 100-yen takoyaki

When one of our Japanese writers grew frustrated with Mr. Sato spending so much money on his lunch while at the office, they decided to show him that it’s possible to get great food at a fraction of the cost. And not just any food, but takoyaki!

Cheap takoyaki? This place must be in Osaka, right? Wrong! Mr. Sato soon found himself on an altogether different flight from Haneda airport, bound for octopus balls and adventure.

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Red is the new black (burger) as Burger King rolls out sandwiches with crimson buns and cheese

When Burger King first rolled out its black hamburgers in Japan in 2012, we thought the company had gone insane. It turns out Burger King really is crazy…crazy like a fox. And not just any fox, but some sort of super-intelligent fox with an advanced degree in marketing, since the black burgers caught the attention of media outlets around the world and were such a hit that they’ve been brought back in multiple updated forms.

The black burgers will once again be returning to Japanese Burger King locations in 2015, but before they do, this summer the chain is debuting a line of bright red burgers with crimson cheese and something called “Angry Sauce.”

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Culturally confusing Vietnamese Burger King found selling Japanese food

Recently our Southeast Asia correspondent Kowloon Kurosawa took a trip from his current residence in Cambodia to the neighboring country of Vietnam. Following standard RocketNews24 foreign travel protocol he soon made his way to a Burger King in Ho Chi Minh City.

However, what he found surprised even our cholestorol-hardened reporter. This Burger King has a special combo menu called Rice King. Not only that but it contained a teriyaki tonkatsu combo!

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McDonald’s Japan to return “free smiles” to menu

In my more formative years I worked the counter at McDonald’s. It was an okay job for someone with no prior work experience and helped to support my SNES habit. However, the one thing I hated was when a customer approached the counter and would ask for a “free smile” because it was written on the menu.

It had gotten to the point that I could tell the look on a customer’s face before they even opened their mouth to ask for my worthless grin. And so, I’d give them that “oh you” smile as if I hadn’t heard the joke a thousand times before and a little bit of myself would die inside.

Now a whole new generation of Japanese youngsters will get to have that same experience as McDonald’s Japan announced the return of zero-yen smiles to their menus at all stores all day long.

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Lotteria continues to try making burgers out of noodles, this time they brought rice to the party

Despite a rather weak track-record for its hamburgers with patties of noodles, fast-food chain Lotteria is back at it with the Moko Tanmen Burger. This time around they’ve also come up with the Moko Don Burger which uses a wad of rice as the patty. Good thing Dr. Atkins isn’t around to see this.

They say the definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. We’re not sure what to call RocketNews24 reporter Mr. Sato then, because he is returning to Lotteria for a fourth time to try these noodley sandwiches in hopes of some redemption.

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The five-patty Lotteria burger wasn’t big enough, so we made a 35-patty burger instead!

When we heard last month that Japanese burger chain Lotteria was bringing back their legendary five-patty Tower Burger, we knew that we had to give it a try. Unfortunately we didn’t realize the special was only available until the end of April, so when we finally got around to it there was nothing but boring normal burgers left.

But then we realized something: the Tower Burger is just five patties stacked on top of each other. We could just buy five patties and make our own anytime! In fact… there’s no limit to how many patties we could stack. We could even have something ridiculous, like a 35-patty burger!

And so we did. And we ate it. This is our adventure.

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We try deliciously meaty US-style “Inside-Out” ramen burgers at Ramen Burger Tokyo

It seems that when Japanese food makes its way over to America, something gets lost in translation and the food winds up inside-out. Just look at California rolls, for example.

And now, here’s another example of Japanese food being flipped: “Ramen burgers” which usually consist of a bun filled with ramen noodles, have been reborn in the US as, um, “ramen burgers”, but with a twist – the meat patty is sandwiched between two “buns” made of tightly packed noodles!

We sent our resident office culinary “expert” Mr Sato down to the first “US-style ramen burger” joint in Japan for a taste test!

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Truth in advertising: Lotteria’s monstrous Burger with Everything on It is exactly that

You can probably describe about 90 percent of fast food with some combination of the words “convenient,” “greasy,” and “delicious.” In the case of Japanese hamburger chain Lotteria, though, you’ll want to make an addition to your vocabulary list: “crazy.”

Oh, sorry, looks like a typo slipped through. That should actually be “crazy!!!”

Lotteria is sort of the playground daredevil of the Japanese fast food scene. On just about any given day, you’ll find at least one item on the menu that seems to have been created not so much because it’s a good idea, but so that the restaurant can say, “Hey guys! Look at what I can do!” Every now and again, though, Lotteria gets its batch of crazy sauce just right, which is why it’s bringing back the awe-inspiring Burger with Everything on It.

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“Supreme Court Beef” and other translation fails from the new Taco Bell Japan website

Media in Japan, us included, have been all over Taco Bell’s return to the country this week, but talk hasn’t been entirely of tacos. The Taco Bell Japan website was also making news when Japanese speakers noticed it had some pretty terrible and funny English-to-Japanese translations.

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  • Apr 21, 2015

Hooray! Taco Bell opens in Japan and we’re there to get the commemorative T-shirt and free taco!

While you can certainly find countless restaurants offering a seemingly endless range of cuisines in Japan, if you’ve spent some time in the country, you may have noticed that options for Mexican food (or at least American-Mexican food) can be somewhat limited. So when news went around that American fast food chain Taco Bell was going to re-open in Japan, the response on the Japanese Internet was huge. And while we understand that not everyone is a fan of Taco Bell, there certainly seemed to be enough people overjoyed that the chain was finally returning to Japan after having opened shop here once for just a short time in the 1980s.

All of this meant that the opening of the new Taco Bell shop in Shibuya, Tokyo was bound to attract lots of attention as well as a good crowd, and not to miss out on the excitement and tacos, our very own Mr. Sato from the Japanese arm of RocketNews24 was there on opening day to bring you the following report!

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Paying for nothing: Japanese burger chain’s latest sandwich doesn’t actually have a patty

It’s not unheard of for customers at fast food restaurants to discover that the burger they ordered is either missing one of its ingredients or contains something that they asked to be left out. It’s quite another issue entirely, however, to receive a burger that’s missing its patty and for that order to still be technically correct.

But that’s exactly what wacky Japanese hamburger chain Lotteria has done with its latest creation. Say hello the “No-Shrimp Burger”; a shrimp burger without the shrimp.

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Vegetarian Yoshinoya? We taste test the chain’s new veggie rice bowl

Yoshinoya, Japan’s most ubiquitous domestic fast food chain, is known first and foremost for its beef bowls. So strong is the mental connection between the restaurant and gyudon, as beef bowls are called in Japanese, that Yoshinoya’s nickname among fans is Yoshigyu.

So we were surprised to hear that Yoshinoya’s newest menu item is not only beef-free, but doesn’t contain any meat at all! A vegetarian option at the king of beef bowl restaurants? Not only does it exist, but we’ve tried it.

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  • Apr 2, 2015

Here’s what we got when we ordered the chef’s recommendation…at McDonald’s!

If you’re a foodie who dreams of eating at Michelin and Zagat rated establishments, perhaps you’ve also fantasized about saying to the Maitre d’ at a fancy restaurant, “Can I speak with the chef? I’d like to thank him/her for a superb meal.”  Granted, such a dining situation may not come up very often, but what you may be able to do more easily instead is to order “whatever the chef’ recommends.”

And that’s exactly what our RocketNews24 Japan staff decided to do at a series of restaurants, the first one being  none other than…McDonald’s! Now, we’d like to think that all people working in a kitchen, whatever the type of restaurant, actually want to serve tasty food, and to that end would likely have a definite opinion on what they would most like customers to try.  So, asking for the chef’s recommendation should result in a more than satisfying meal, right? Well, we were certainly excited to find out what the recommendation would be at one of the world’s best-known fast food chains!

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