Monday, June 21, 2021

At First Bite: MOS Burger's New Melon Pan Burger Is...Unconventional, to Say the Least

PHOTO BY MOS Burger ILLUSTRATION Warren Espejo

(SPOT.ph) Plain burgers are great, but there's also lot you can do with the dish to change things up. The most common route is by changing up the fillings—say, by including cheese, using different sauces, or adding other meaty components like bacon strips—but some also introduce variation by way of swapping the traditional sesame-seed dotted soft bun for other breads, like brioche and pretzel buns. But can you imagine a burger with melon pan (a.k.a. the Japanese bread with a soft bread base covered in a crisp biscuit or cookie-like layer) as its bread component? Us neither. That is, until we got to try the recently-introduced Melon Pan Teriyaki Burger from Japanese chain MOS Burger.

Yup, a it's burger with melon pan as its bun.
PHOTO BY Patricia Baes

The Melon Pan Teriyaki Burger (P229/solo, P329/set with hashbrown and drink) is said to have a beef patty, special teriyaki sauce, lettuce, tomato, cheese, and egg in between a halved piece of melon pan. Now we're huge fans of MOS  Burger's other signatures, but we were pretty skeptical about this one. After all, melon pan is a sweet bread—the kind you'd down as a snack with a cup of tea, not quite the kind you'd use for a savory sandwich. And as if the idea of a melon-pan burger wasn't strange enough, MOS Burger also decided to color the bread a rather bright green. Frankly, the whole thing seems gimmicky. But in the name of, y'know, science, we took a bite hoping that our hunches would be proven otherwise.

Don't get us wrong: We get that savory plus sweet combos are A Thing, and we're not against that. In theory, you could loosely compare this burger to Chinese sweet pork buns (e.g., the kind you can get from Tim Ho Wan or Tuan Tuan) that also have a sugary crust and savory-sweet filling. But in practice, this leans almost a tad too far toward the sweet side, with its decidedly sugary melon-pan bun.

The savory part of the equation comes via the patty, which is the typical kind you get from a MOS burger: a touch bouncy with a good, meaty flavor, cheese, and hint of teriyaki sauce (we wish there were more, but it's there and contributes some umami to the mix). But—perhaps due in part to the fact that it's the melon pan that hits your tongue first as you take a bite—the sweetness and butteriness of the said bread overpowers. The melon pan also tastes off when combined with what seems to be a smear of Japanese mayo on the bottom half of the bun (we don't know about you, but we don't exactly crave mayo in the context of sweets), and the egg hardly contributes much to the mix of flavors.

Strangely, we did start to enjoy the burger the more we ate it, and there are some bragging rights to be gained from the experience. Do we regret trying it? Not really. Heck, we could still see the idea working out with a slightly less sweet melon pan! In the meantime, we'll stick to our go-to Yakiniku Rice Burger and Cheeseburger when we're ordering from MOS.

If you'd like to try the burger for yourself, you can catch it at MOS Burger's stores and Eastwood and BGC food trucks for a limited time. For delivery orders, you can also give the store nearest you a call or find MOS Burger on GrabFood or Foodpanda.

MOS Burger has branches at L/2 Robinsons Galleria, Ortigas, Quezon City, Ortigas, Quezon City and 3/F Bridgeway, SM Megamall, Ortigas, Mandaluyong City. See a list of MOS Burger branches and food truck locations. For delivery orders, see a list of MOS Burger contact numbers or find MOS Burger on GrabFood or Foodpanda. For more information, check out MOS Burger Philippines' Facebook page.

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Source: Spot PH

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