Today I ate two things: whale steak and the Windows 7 burger. Only one of these meals made me want to vomit.
CheapyD, who's no stranger to eating gigantic-ass burgers (I had that burger earlier in the week too), tried his mouth on the Windows 7 burger with his buddy. I physically couldn't watch his video while writing this post because it the gastrointestinal wound was too fresh, so I don't know if he liked it or not—I just know that he finished the thing with his buddy.
I, on the other hand, tried to consume the thing with my wife, and the two of us couldn't quite manage to finish it. Not so much that we weren't hungry, we just couldn't stand the taste of it anymore. It was hard to actually even hold, being made out of two flimsy pieces of bread soaked in the juices from seven pieces of meat. There are a few problems with the way they made this burger. One, there's no cheese. Two, there's barely anything else besides meat. It would have been much more appetizing if they had made the tomatoes and lettuce and onions in proportion to the meat. As is, in the Shibuya, Tokyo store at least, there was one slice of lettuce, a few tomatoes and not much of anything else.
How does it taste? How do you think it tastes? It's seven pieces of Burger King meat. There's no way I would eat this thing normally. I did it for you. Oh, and it'snot 777 Yen—it's goddamn 1450 Yen. The only people who got the 777 Yen deal were the ones who showed up at launch, or on a first-come-first-served basis. I couldn't understand the tellers well enough to get the story straight. Point is, it's not only ridiculously bad, it's expensive too.
This is meat followed by meat, washed down by meat. You start with an appetizer of meat, then maybe a meat salad and some meat soup, perhaps interjected by a meat meat, then moving on to the entree of meat, enhanced by a bottle of your best red meat. Oh waiter, what's for dessert? Is it meat? Oh this chef is so creative.
Since I am not a snake, I couldn't unhinge my jaw to get the entire burger into my mouth at once. The best way, we found, was to eat it like an ice cream sundae; by hacking away at its sides with a fork. We were like chefs at a Greek restaurant, chipping at a a gigantic clump of flesh a little bit at a time; except there was no falafel at the end of this, just more F-grade ground beef. As shown in the video, you're going to be eating meat almost all the time, with a little bit of bread and tomato occasionally as frosting.
The proportions were similar to Adam's giant cheeto, in that too much of the insideof a thing totally screws up the delicate balance set forth by its maker. If you had an Oreo that was five inches of frosting and two normal-sized cookies on the end, you'd quickly discover that nature, like Nabisco, knows the meaning of moderation.
To recreate this Windows 7 burger for yourself without having to travel to Japan, head to Burger King and order a Whopper. Then throw a ten dollar bill down and ask them to make six more patties as disgustingly as possible.
I've been in Tokyo a week, and I can say that, for the most part, Japanese people are quite thin thanks to their normal diet. This Windows 7 burger must be Microsoft's way to get them up to the US range in order to make us feel better about ourselves.
Oh and as you probably guessed already, the burger was the thing that made me want to vomit—the whale actually tasted pretty good. Kinda like a tough steak. And whale tongue? That was even better. Fried whale was kinda weird, but edible.
Unless Apple decides to make a Snow Leopard Big Leopard Mac promotion with McDonalds, I'll see you all in a week when I'm back from Japan. In the meantime, you can keep up with me on Twitter.
Send an email to Jason Chen, the author of this post, at jchen@gizmodo.com.
Windows 7 Burger from Gizmodo on Vimeo.
