MOS crafts some really good Japanese-style hamburgers. They aren’t modified from a Western recipie to conform to Japanese tastes: They are built from the ground up for domestic consumption – that’s probably why they bombed when they opened two stores in Honolulu decades ago. The Tobikiri hamburger is no exception to the domestic tastes rule. That’s not to say that if you aren’t Japanese, you won’t like this burger – it just isn’t the plain salty charred meat slab hidden beneath ketchup and mustard that you are used to. The patty is made from a mix of beef and pork (aibiki) and is topped with a thick slice of Hokkaido-produced bacon and sauteed onions with a bacon-shoyu sauce. They pride themselves on domestic sourcing, so the beef, pork, bacon, and onions are all domestic. This is reflected in the price, since the burger alone is 420-yen (around $5.38 USD). If you go to their website, they have a breakdown for the sourcing of ingredients on the product page.
The burger is very good. It is easily one of their better seasonal burgers. The sweet onions, sauce, and bacon balance the savory meat and tangy coarse-ground mustard. If I had to compartmentalize the flavor, with the sweet/soy thing going on, it would be teriyaki. If you’re thinking the thick, sickly-sweet, nearly-black gloppy gravyish crap they put on burgers back home, that’s not the teriyaki I’m talking about. I’d easily buy this again. Size is another matter – although the diameter is much smaller than a standard USDM Mc Donalds hamburger, the patty is thicker, so the mass of the meat is closer to that of a Quarter Pounder. I had it as a “salad set” which included a nice green salad and a drink. This added 350-yen (around $4.49 USD), bringing the grand total to 770-yen (around $9.87 USD). Yes, that is expensive for a somewhat small burger meal, but like I’ve said about MOS in the past – it’s defeintely the quality that brings me back time and again.
Recommended
Three-and-a-half out of four domestically-grown monkeys
770-yen for the set
Aaaahhh, sounds so ono! I miss me some MOS Burger.