Have you ever had those tiny burgers that Americans call ‘sliders’? You know the things; you can eat them in one bite and only a half dozen of them will leave you even close to satiated. Well I’ve had them once and it was one of the most enjoyable food experiences of my life. This is not that experience.
I saw these three mini burger looking Croquette buns and felt immediately very excited. I hadn’t seen these before and what an original idea, I thought. Sure it obviously isn’t a set of burger sliders, but it sure made me think of them, and that’s got to count for something. I love croquettes, I love burgers, and I love mini versions of food. There was so much promise.
The last time I ignored the lack of heating instructions on a conbini item, I burned my mouth, so I followed the guidance and ate these cold. On the first bite I was confronted by the soft, mushy, stodgy consistency of the croquette. The word ‘croquette’ has a lot of hard consonant sounds, the corse roughness of the ‘cr’, the clicking ‘q’ sound, and the final triumphant ‘t’ to finish strongly. It’s a food that should taste as it sounds. These were less ‘croquette’ and more ‘croquette’.
The bread was normal for conbini food. Dry and slightly too sweet. The sauce was a really puzzling thing. I didn’t expect ketchup, because ketchup in food is as hard to find in Japan as a straightforward answer to a question is to find in…Japan.
It was instead a sweet and thin brown sauce of dubious identity. At first I thought it was BBQ but after another punishing bite I realised it was instead a strange version of Worcestershire sauce (if you’re American I want you to read that sauce name aloud and feel embarrassed at your pronunciation).
So far, so awful. The final fatal nail in this croquette burger’s coffin is that, despite being stored at room temperature in the Family Mart I bought it in, the inside was totally cold. It was literally as though it was refrigerated. It didn’t make any sense. It made less sense when I left the remaining two croquettes for nearly an hour to go back to work and when I had another bite it was still as cold. If this wasn’t the most crappy croquette experience I’ve ever had, I might be interested in finding out what was going on. But it was, so I’m not.
This was such a disappointment. Rating: 0 hard consonant sounds.
Ben Dean-Titterrell 