The Impossible Whopper is Here!
It’s on the signs of Burger King outlets all over town: “The Impossible Whopper.” Although we don’t normally eat much fast food, we were very excited to check this out.
For those who may be wondering what the fuss is about, here’s some background. As more people are looking to eat plant-based meals at least some of the time, the restaurant game is changing. And now Burger King has partnered with the company Impossible Foods to distribute their plant-based burger across the U.S.
We’ve written a ton of restaurant reviews here at Midtown Montgomery Living, and if you have read any of them, you know that we are usually ordering the meatless items from the menu. As such, we often miss out on some of the things that are people’s most favorite food items from the places around town. Even so, we never really figured that we’d be singing the praises of Burger King.
Bottom line: The Impossible Whopper is really delicious. It’s so good that we had a moment where we examined our burgers to make sure that we hadn’t gotten meat by mistake. This is almost certainly exactly the kind of reaction that the execs at Burger King and Impossible Foods wanted us to have. People who eat a lot of beef burgers may not be fooled, but we’d wager that even quasi-carnivores would appreciate the substitution effect.
Look, it’s been decades since either of us have eaten a Whopper. Maybe our perceptions were a little warped. But as regular consumers of veggie burgers, we’ve got pretty high standards for them. We’ve ranted on this blog before about the virtues of the veggie burgers at the Montgomery Biscuits game, but Burger King’s version has got to be one of the very best ever made. And you can get it in the drive-thru! In our neighborhood!
This feels like the future.
“Didn’t Burger King always have a veggie burger?” you may be asking. We’ve got respect for Burger King’s decision to keep a veggie burger on their menu for these many years, but we long since stopped eating that. This is because Burger King’s previous veggie burger was absolute trash. It embodied all of the concepts most people conjure up when they hear the phrase “veggie burger” — the cardboardy taste, the strange mealy texture, the composition of visible yet unidentifiable vegetable bits, the aftertaste. It was just never a winner – no matter how many condiments you draped across it.
The Impossible Whopper isn’t perfect. It seems like there’s a lot of mayo, for example, and the lettuce/tomato toppings are pretty weak. And if you get a combo meal, the BK fries are not on the top tier of salty friend potato sticks. But, especially measured against other fast food items that can be received quickly and cheaply and eaten in a car, it’s an astonishingly good menu item that will certainly challenge most people’s assumptions about vegetarian food.
Kate and Stephen are Midtown residents with two cats, a dog, ten fish, a garden, an old house and a sense of adventure. They write about life in Midtown here and about life in Montgomery at their blog Lost in Montgomery.
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