No-nonsense Food Review: Lotteria’s Ramyan Burger

looks can be deceiving, even when you expect it

In my time as the A&C editor for the university’s magazine, I used to often encourage my writers to go find expressive, vibrant yet blatantly conceptualized food menus. I give you my word, we had pretty good success covering some amazingly weird cuisines available in around Nokdu, Seoul National University and Nakseongde; three of the places in and around our university. In fact, I was so wind up with some of the Korean-west fusion cuisines that I actually ended up enjoying some of the Kimchi infused burgers to fries a lot more than I imagined. If that is, you can call them cuisines.

But then established burger chains somehow manage to put burger beef patties in between hardened ramyan noodles which makes you wanna think if this is going to get any weirder.

I mean come on, seriously?

When J first put up lotteria’s (a multi-national burger chain here in Korea) advertisement on his wall, I honestly had a good laugh at it. I mean, I love the notion of people trying to be creative but this was crossing the line. It’s like erasing the line and redrawing it somehow into the boarders of insanity. Yet, humans being curious, and me being a human, I had to go and taste it for myself.

And I did.

One thing you immediately notice upon the arrival of your prized burger is how small it really is. Normally, when fast food joints post of up images of their seemingly sumptuous, fat delicacies they often tend to exaggerate to a point where people already have a scaled down mental image of what their burger would really look like in reality.

I did that too and I still found it surprisingly small. You really do need midget hands to even feel comfortable holding it. If you have seen the movie Harold and Kumar go to White Castle and seen the part where they actually do go to while castle (spoiler alert?) and munch on those gazillion tiny sliders, then you will know what I am talking about.

image credits: burgers.co.kr

What’s next, oh yeah, the taste. Well, for one thing, me and my friend who had just helped me move to a better place, were damn hungry. We were both at a point where even tree barks would taste like crackers. Needless to say, the burger tasted amazing. The hardened exterior of the ramyan “bun” allows the interior to remain soft and you will notice that as you bite through the layers and into the middle portion of the burger. A burst of red chilli sauce then greets the buds and combines well with the meat. As you take more bite off the burger, its gets better and better but then ends abruptly. It’s almost like watching a damn good movie and being cut of right in the middle just because there’s not enough juice left on your laptops battery. Or in this case, the burger.

For the price you pay, I would rather go to Ajumma’s place and eat a hearty meal instead of trying to fill up my empty bellies with fries, coke and more fries. My friend remarked that Lotteria should have put the burger as the side and not the fries.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Madeinepal’s official no-nonsense burger ratings:

Price 1/5
Taste 4.5/5 (highly subjective)

Satisfaction 1/5

Orgasm 0/5

Total: 6.5/20 , I didn't even score this low on my engineering tests. Absolute bullocks.