At Moon, Ocean & Sun (MOS) Burger, they love replacing the traditional burger buns with alternatives to bread. They do rice burgers. I've eaten the 'bunless' lettuce burger that was wrapped in crunchy greens.
The 'meat meat meat' option has even more burger where the buns should be.
MOS announced this burger with the help of comedian Ariyoshi Hiroki. (That's meant to be his face in the above pic.) He's arguably one of the most famous people in Japan. Nearly 7 million Twitter followers should count for something, right?
That might be why the 'meat meat meat' burger is much more of a limited edition than most special MOS menu items, on sale for only a week. (June 21st-27th, 2017.)
I'd read that it's not available at every MOS branch, and can't be ordered to take away. I was still asked whether I wanted to eat in, but I think that was just out of habit. It's also not on their online ordering service, you have to go and see this burger for yourself.
At 850 yen (roughly £6) by itself, the 'triple meat' is one of the most expensive burgers I've ever tried in Japan. Still far cheaper than craft burgers back in England...
The name is a real shame. In Japanese, it's 'nikunikuniku' (にくにくにく). Internet trolls are calling it 'nikunikushii' (にくにくしい), which means 'hateful, loathsome, detestable'. How did MOS miss that?
Back to the positives. This stack of meaty glory contains both yakiniku beef and teriyaki chicken. The burger patties sandwiching it together at either end are the third 'meat' in the name. A few green leaves and bits of lettuce are thrown in as concessions. Disappointingly, there's no sauce aside from the meat marinades.
It smells amazing. The yakiniku in particular. The flavours blend nicely, although the teriyaki sauce is more subtle. It's hard to pick up, but get the balancing act right and you can taste everything in one bite.
Once you've tried to take that bite, you'll notice more of the glaring architectural flaws in this burger. The yakiniku is in bits, and the teriyaki chicken is a solid chunk. The beef burgers are relatively small, so they don't keep everything together so well. So all the meat in the middle tried to make an escape: the yakiniku by dropping out, the chicken by clinging on for dear life to avoid me.
By the end, I had one burger patty and some lettuce left to cobble together. Everything else had fallen out. It turned into a heavily meat-based garden salad.
I did miss the bread with this. I would've liked a version that had buns around the burgers. But something tells me this one isn't coming back for a while, if ever.
Verdict: 8/10. There's probably no such thing as 'too much meat'. But there's definitely such a thing as 'not enough bread'.