Fast-food Burger Eat-Compare

Burgers are great. Burgers are also terrible. What I mean by that is that the concept of a burger is superb, but the execution is almost always wrong. Or worse, the "correct" execution is just boring. At face value, it seems simple to make a good burger - a big, grilled slab of ground meat on a bun, with onions, tomatoes, ketchup and mustard. What can go wrong? So much.

Most burgers end up overcooked to the point of dessication. Condiments can be difficult to balance properly - I've had plenty of burgers that just tasted like ketchup, or worse, mayo. The bun is often neglected, and any old cheap by-the-gross "hamburger-style" bun is deemed sufficient. And I can't count how many times I've been served a burger without dressings at all, but only condiments - yes, I do actually want a salad on my burger, thank you! But even when properly executed, there are mistakes to make. The biggest mistake (in our humble opinion) is the fixation on having a 100% beef patty. Put some diced onion in there! Or some tomato paste! Or some spinach! Season the meat, for goodness sake! Mix beef and turkey! Go nuts! Beef, by itself, is really about the most boring flavor in the world. My mother says it tastes brown. I disagree - it's more like a gray.

The worst offenders against burgerkind are fast-food vendors, usually, even though this is supposedly the product that they make all their money of off. You might suppose that a global corporation with billions of dollars and entire teams of test chefs and engineers behind them would be able to discover the concept of "seasoning meat", but I've yet to encounter a major fast-food chain that could pull it off properly. Fast-food burgers are usually greasy, thin, dry, underseasoned, and underdressed - or so we supposed.

Mariam and I rarely eat fast-food anything. On the one hand, this is because we actually can cook, and enjoy our own cooking - nevermind fast food, we rarely eat out. But fast food holds a special place of disdain for us. If we're going to go out somewhere and pay somebody else to cook food for us, we might as well go somewhere good and sit down. Fast food? I know my way around a kitchen - don't tell me you can properly cook meat in twenty seconds! Can't be done! But here's the thing - this disdain, this indifference even to the offerings of fast food means that we don't eat it - ever. So realistically, do we actually know what we're missing? Are fast-food burgers as bad as we suppose? We think we've got burgers figured out, with our own methods and ingredients, but do we? To what, really, are we to compare?

This prompted us some time ago to actually do the test, and eat-compare some fast-food burgers. We went around to six major fast-food chains, as well as to two "high-brow" fast-food chains to pick up what we considered to be flagship burgers. That's eight different restaurants, and eight burgers to compare, chosen for their relative superficial similarity, and how much we thought they represented the brands of their respective chains.


Some chains here you may not be familiar with - some you are familiar with may not be here - the US is a big country, and a lot of chains are regional. This is what was available in Houston:

McDonald's - Big Mac
Wendy's - Hot 'N Juicy Double
Sonic - Super Sonic Double
Burger King - Double Whopper
Jack in the Box - Jumbo Jack
Whataburger - Double Whataburger
5 Guys - Hamburger "All the Way"
Smashburger - Classic Big Smash

The two establishments at the bottom are what we are calling "high-brow", largely because they cost more than the others, and that's sort of how they market themselves. 5 Guys, in particular, has little framed magazine clippings on the wall from positive reviews, like many other restaurants. But let's not fool ourselves - both 5 Guys and Smashburger are fast food.

Note that all of these burgers are "doubles", meaning they have two patties. The reason for this was two-fold - first, the Big Mac is a double by default, and we chose it from McDonald's lineup because it is the iconic fast-food burger. If one burger was a double, they all had to be doubles to make a fair comparison. Secondly, have you ever seen a fast-food burger before? You see how small they are? Nobody orders a single, come on.

We split each burger down the middle with a serrated knife, and each ate from our respective halves. What follows is our assessment of each burger:

McDonald's Big Mac

Let's just get this out of the way right now - the Big Mac looks terrible. It is not an appetizing burger. It is easily the least attractive burger among these contenders, so it's losing before the first bite is taken. It is droopy, the bread looks moist (the bread, guys, not the meat) and everything about it is pale. A burger should not make me sad, but looking at the Big Mac - just looking at it - does just that. Every marketing photograph you have ever seen of a Big Mac is a dirty, rotten lie. And no, McDonald's, naming this burger a Big Mac doesn't make it bigger - it is, in fact, shockingly small. It comes in a big box, but that's the only thing that's big about it.

The Big Mac is also an achievement in putting very little meat in a burger. Yes, there are two patties in there - technically. One could be forgiven for missing them, however - in truth, I am impressed that somebody was able to grill a patty so thin without having it fall apart when they tried to flip it. But maybe it was already overcooked to dry, rubbery stiffness by that point - it certainly was when it was placed on the burger.

The bulk of the Big Mac is bread - that weird middle bun piece may look neat in marketing photos, but it's there just to give the appearance of a larger product. It's filler - sweet, doughy filler. The only dressing on the Big Mac were three wafer-thin pickle slices, a few meek strands of limp shredded lettuce, and apparently some bits of minced onion, though their presence escaped my notice. The only flavor worth considering on the Big Mac is the so-called special sauce, which is actually not bad (it's similar but not identical to thousand island dressing), but it is the only flavor. One could get the same effect by just ordering some of the special sauce, and dipping fries into it. In fact, that sounds much better.

Wendy's Hot 'N Juicy Double

The big and juicy double is what we would call a medium-sized burger - it's a decent portion. Certainly it dwarfs the already miniscule Big Mac. And furthermore, it's loaded with meat. Wendy's signature square patties hang out over the edges of the bun, and two of them amount to a full 1/2 lb of meat (before all the moisture was cooked out of them, anyway). Like most of the burgers on this list, however, it appeared smashed, as though somebody had roughly pounded down the top of it in order to fit it on a crowded shelf or into some enormous stack of - ooohhh, right.  The bun has some color to it, but its rough treatment has damaged it, and its no longer appealing.

Remember now, I was using a serrated steak knife to cut through these burgers, which are all made of ground beef - probably low-lean ground beef, at that. Cutting through a steak with a steak knife should be easy, but you pretty much can't tenderize beef any more than by grinding it up. This burger was notable for just how difficult it was to cut through it. Yeah, there were two patties in there, and they're actually reasonably thick, but I've cut through steaks thicker than this whole burger that were much more tender while also being much leaner. Wendy's can get away with calling this burger hot inasmuch as it was cooked at some point on a hot grill. However, juicy is just false advertising. This meat was overcooked in the extreme - no moisture remained in that meat. But worse, it seems to have been overcooked at low temperature, which means there wasn't even any nice searing or charring to lend some interesting bitter notes - it was just a big stack of dry grayness. In other words, it was merely overcooked, not burned - and I would have preferred burned.

Dressings? Condiments? It doesn't matter. The meat was cooked to such dry blandness that whatever else was on the burger was swallowed up in a dessert of gray rubber.

Sonic's Super Sonic Double

Boy, Sonic sure does have some amusing and creative ads, don't they? Ha ha. Heh. Well. Oh, they make burgers, too, do they? Well, how about that. Good for them. Moving up. Yeah. Good. For. Them.

For reasons I now completely fail to understand, some people seem to really swear by Sonic. It's the "good" fast-food chain, I've heard people say. Yeah, it's quirky - you can get your burger delivered by a chick on roller skates. Yeah, they've got tater tots. Oh boy, now I'm eight years old again...or something. You know you can just buy frozen tater tots at the grocery store, right guys? You did know that, right? And I've heard people swear by their burgers, too, though suspiciously, nobody can describe in detail what it is they actually like about Sonic's burgers. What's on them? How's the meat? How's the cheese? Is the bun firm and fresh?

I don't know why people swear by Sonic, but I now understand completely why they can't tell me what it is they like about Sonic's burgers. The Super Sonic Double is an achievement. It is a remarkable, incredible piece of fast food engineering. Never before have I eaten a burger so utterly nondescript and void of anything approaching what I might term "flavor". I seriously could not put this burger down. Every bite was an amazement - I simply refused to believe that there was food in my mouth, so I had to take another bite to confirm. The Super Sonic Double is the most tasteless thing I have ever eaten, and I literally cannot remember anything else about it.

Burger King's Double Whopper

Besides the Big Mac, the Whopper is the other burger on this list that we might term iconic. It's the Big Mac's rival, the other duelist in the long fast-food burger wars. This was the weapon that Burger King used to try and dethrone McDonald's from its fast-food global supremacy, and take the position that is its namesake - the King of Burgers.

I thought on this as I prepared to try the Double Whopper. I had already tasted the Big Mac - if that was the burger that this burger had battled with for decades and failed to dethrone, I wasn't really looking forward to my meal.

Certainly the Double Whopper looks much better than the Big Mac. For one thing, it has some color to it, and not just brown and gray, but it also just looks a bit less - sad. The Double Whopper was also one of the largest burgers on this list. The dressing was decent - there are actually (thin) tomato slices on a Double Whopper, as well as sliced - not minced or whatever - onion and the lettuce is whole leaf, not shredded. The bun, however, is noticeably sweet and was smashed down to a gummy mass on the top. As with most of the burgers here as well, the patties were overcooked and dry, and seemed to lack any seasoning whatsoever.

Ah, but what really ruined the Double Whopper was the "cheese". I don't know what this stuff was. I suppose it was, at some point, a slice or sheet of some cheese-like orange substance laid down on a hot patty. But two things were wrong with it. Well, several things, really, but I'll talk about two. First off, it was too thick. I'm not normally one to complain about too much cheese on a burger, but when your other ingredients are as bland as fast-food burgers typically are, you need to go light or risk overpowering everything. If it had been some good sharp cheddar or an aged gouda, I might not have minded, but this was that strange variety of cheese that we all don't have a name for, so we just call "American".

The second thing wrong, though, that really ruined the whole burger, was the cheese's texture. I expect cheese to melt, and get gooey or creamy on a burger. Swiss and cheddar do the former, blue does the latter - all are excellent burger cheeses. The cheese on the Double Whopper became pasty. I don't know how to describe that in a way any less appetizing. The cheese broke down and became like a thick layer of some coagulated condiment, rather than "cheese" in any proper sense. I want to compare it to Velveeta, but I think I'd be misrepresenting the physical properties of Velveeta. The Burger King cheese was bad. Really bad.

Jack in the Box's Jumbo Jack

This was probably the best of the "low-brow" major chains we visited, which is remarkable, because this was also the cheapest burger we got from this entire lineup, at less than $3 after tax. It was a medium-sized burger, with fairly thin patties and sparse (though fresh-ish) dressing. Like most of the rest, these thin patties were overcooked and dry - of course. So what made it stand out? Two things were remarkable about the very cheap Jumbo Jack.

First off, it wasn't smashed, and the bun looked like a bun. Unlike almost every other burger we tried, the bun wasn't just a crumpled wad of sweet, gummy dough - it was bready! You know, like, made of bread, almost like, I don't know - a bun! It had some air and texture to it, and it tasted neither dry and stale, nor doughy and soggy. Most refreshing of all about the bun, however, was that it wasn't sweet. I don't know why, but most of these burgers have sweet buns - is that a thing? Are hamburger buns always supposed to be sweet, and I just missed the memo? When did that happen? I don't like it. I'm eating lunch here, not breakfast. Take the sweetbread elsewhere.

The other remarkable thing about the Jumbo Jack that not even the two "high-brow" establishments could match was that the meat was seasoned. Yeah, imagine that! Adding some salt and pepper, and maybe a hint of paprika to the meat before making a patty! What a discovery! What an innovation!  So even though the meat was dry and overcooked, it did actually taste like something. This was the only of the "low-brow" national chain burgers I actually finished my half of, and for that, Jack in the Box receives my commendation. Not my recommendation, still, but they're on their way. Just two more letters.

Whataburger's Double Whataburger

Sonic has a lot of people swearing by it, but not the way people rave about Whataburger around here. Whataburger has an edge on Sonic - they're Texan. Whataburger is a national chain with franchises in all fifty states, but most of their restaurants are in Texas, where the company was founded and still operates. If you know Texans, then you'll know Texans' pride - people swear by Whataburger because this is Texas. That seems to be enough to get a lot of people to swear up and down that Whataburger makes the best burger of any fast-food joint, and possibly the best burger anywhere. I've been living in Texas long enough to start calling myself Texan, but I don't share this same it's-Texan-so-it's-great mentality. I want objectivity. So we tried the Double Whataburger.

I feel like a broken record - the patties were dry, overcooked, and tasteless. The was smashed flat, and plain flavored. So what did we taste? Condiments and dressing, strangely, something that was missing or at least generic enough to ignore in most of these other burgers. There were onions and tomatoes on show in this burger, in decent enough quantities to matter. The onions were chopped rather than sliced, but that's because they had been sauteed first, so it was a fine thing to do. The dressing was actually not bad, all things considered, and a welcome change from the wafer-thin pickles and wisps of tomato essence that we got on some of the other burgers.

Condiments were a problem on the Whataburger, however. The meat was tasteless, so I commend Whataburger for trying at least to put something of note on their burger. But balance, my friends, balance is necessary in any meal. The Double Whataburger tasted like yellow mustard. That was it. I like mustard, but if I just want to taste mustard, I'll go get a spoon. I want a burger with mustard on it, not mustard with a bun around it, and that's what this was. To be fair, however, had this burger not been drowned in yellow mustard, there may not have been anything else of note to say about it. So, that's a thing, I guess.

5 Guys' Hamburger "All the Way"

Unlike most fast-food chains, 5 Guys doesn't give all their burgers long trademarked names like the "Southwestern Ciabatta Bacon Ranch CrazyBurger". They've basically got two items on their menu - a hamburger, which is two patties, and a small hamburger, which is a single patty. That's the difference. Everything else to differentiate burgers is all in the choice of dressing and condiments - you can get ranch or bacon or quinoa or whatever trendy thing they're putting on burgers this week, but the premium stuff is extra as a dress. They also have a long list of ordinary condiments and dressings that do not cost extra, which you may individually elect to put on your burger. Of these, there's a large subset that are grouped together under the heading "All the Way." Just saying "All the Way" at the counter will get you all of these dressings without having to enumerate them. It's sort of the "standard" 5 Guys experience, so it's what we got in order to compare good representatives of each chain.

Let's start by reminding ourselves that 5 Guys is one of "high-brow" fast-food places we went to. The burgers are more expensive, the food is slightly less fast, and there's no drive-thru. One of the questions we sought to answer when we set about getting and comparing all these burgers was whether that extra price and "high-brow" marketing made any difference - or are these burgers all uniformly terrible? The answer with 5 Guys seems to be yes, there is a difference - that burger costs a dollar or two more for a reason.

The 5 Guys burger was actually executed quite well. The patties were thick and juicy, and were the easiest patties to get my knife through - they were tender, like they should be. These patties were definitely not overcooked, and were not at all dry like the others. This helped their flavor, as well - they tasted like meat. That being said, as I pointed out at the beginning here, plain meat is boring, and these patties, as competently cooked they were, would have mightily benefited from some seasoning - even the Jumbo Jack beat this one out on that. These patties were just pure, plain beef - nothing was done to transform or deepen that flavor. For that reason, we thought that these patties were good, the best by far, but still disappointing, with that disappointment actually emphasized by the quality that was present.

The dressings and condiments were also pleasing, largely because there was a lot of everything, but not too much of anything. One of the things that was attractive about the 5 Guys burger was just how difficult it was to eat - it's a sloppy burger, and that's satisfying for some reason. There's ketchup dripping out, and pickles and mushrooms - yes, mushrooms are standard - slipping out while you eat it. In that respect, it felt more like a restaurant burger, but was much cheaper. The bun, however, was too small for the burger it housed, frankly, and it was smashed like all the others - another disappointing layer of smashed doughy nothing. This time at least there was something nice inside.

Smashburger's Classic Big Smash

The final burger on our list gets the distinction of having, by far, the best bun of any burger we tried. The standard Smashburger bun is a fresh, yellow egg bun that looks and feels as though it would be a pleasure to eat all by itself. It's a large, beautiful yellow bun, toasted lightly on the cut, and it has a good, soft bready feel to it when you bite it.

This superb bun helps with the Classic Big Smash's other distinction - it looked the most appetizing. Simply put, this was an attractive burger, with a big crisp leaf of lettuce, freshly cut red onions, and thick tomato slices peaking out from under that nice yellow bun, on top of an obviously hand-formed patty with some nice charring around the edges. You know all those marketing photos that fast-food chains put up of all their burgers? And how your burger never, ever looks like that? This burger looks like that, like those photos. It really does. Go to Smashburger's website, and check out a marketing photo of one of their burgers. That's actually what their burgers look like. Really.

The patties were okay. They were more coarsely ground than most of the other burgers we tried, which gives you something a bit more interesting to chew on, as far as texture is concerned. But again, they were somewhat overcooked (nowhere near as bad as most of these places) and drier than they ought to have been, and they should have been seasoned with something.

The standard Classic Smash comes with something on it called Smash sauce in lieu of ketchup, mustard and etc. for condiments. We rather liked the Smash sauce - it was like mayo plus, with a tanginess that might have been pickle brine or something, and a mustardy zing. The sauce has no hint of tomato in it, but the generous slices of tomato dressing this burger more than made up for the lack ketchup - it is not needed here.

Final Words and Awards

So, basically, we were right - fast-food burgers are terrible. Not all uniformly terrible - 5 Guys and Smashburger make burgers that aren't really bad, they're just less than they could be. They're disappointing not because they are burgers done badly, but because they're sort of boring burgers done actually quite well. The major national chains, however, all failed to even execute a burger competently - to a one, they were all bad burgers.

Trying to identify which is these burgers was the "best" is kind of futile - which is best, breaking your knee, or breaking your pelvis? In fact, it's difficult to even say which was the worst. But we can give some awards:

McDonald's Big Mac: Saddest Burger, Smallest Burger, and Ugliest Burger, triple award winner
Wendy's Hot 'N Juicy Double: Dessert in a Bun Award
Sonic's Super Sonic Double: Winner of the inaugural Super Sonic Indescribable Blandness Award
Burger King's Double Whopper: Saddest Burger runner-up (still loses to the Big Mac)
Jack in the Box's Jumbo Jack: Least Worst Burger
Whataburger's Double Whataburger: Most Texan Award (consolation prize)
5 Guys' Hamburger "All the Way": The "Almost-There" Disappointment Award
Smashburger's Classic Big Smash: The Not-Smashed Burger Award and Most Ironic Award Award

In the end, we prefer our own burgers cooked at home to any of these we ate. But okay, we get what we get. Of these, which did we prefer? We really aren't sure, but the best we could come up with was if the 5 Guys patties were inside the Smashburger bun and dressing. Smashburger and 5 Guys both rival even a lot of restaurant burgers, and we would like to emphasize that these were not bad, just - ehh.

It's the all-beef patty thing. Mariam and I don't get it. We want stuff in our burger. We want the meat to taste like more than just meat. It's not good enough to just cook the meat well, so it's tender and juicy - that's a basic skill. That's just knowing how to cook meat. It's just being a competent cook. When we pay for food, that's the minimum we expect - basic kitchen competency. More would be if the patty were special somehow, with vegetables mixed in, or a blend of meats, or spices. That's what we do, and it's a wonder to us that it's not done more with burgers, even in restaurants where you can pay almost as much for a hamburger as for another more substantial entree. But the simple fact is that all these places keep serving - and advertising proudly - all-beef patties because, for some reason, that's what people demand. We don't get it, but then again, we didn't like any of these burgers, so maybe we just don't get burgers.