One’s Drive, Marunouchi (新丸B1)

It’s marvelously open-ended, isn’t it? One’s drive to…succeed? the mall? master English? the green?

That plus the incredibly cryptic and referential pop-culture columns I’ve been reading today leads me to say ‘On da gween!!!’ in hopes that someone will get it (but hopes are low).

And with burgers, hope still persists. Hope dies last, they say, and my hopes of really liking a burger in Japan are still alive. I know exactly what the problem is – it’s the patties. You might say, and rightly, I think, that the patty is pretty much what a burger is about. My problem with burgers in Japan is that they are thin, lacking in texture, and pretty much always gently griddled. Today’s was even done with the ‘dome on top’ method so that the rest of the burger steams while the down side is cooking. I long to try the burgers I read about in America (and as an aside, I have to admit that I’ve been reading Roboppy’s blog all year, but not checking so much on the burger site where she works. I like the occasional Philadelphia reference.) – the ones where they carefully blend five different cuts of meat taken from different colors of cows, then massage it together using only the relatively weaker left hand and an Antipodean Thrust technique, then apply a mix of fire and thermonuclear exhaust steam to roast it into submission.

The burgers in Japan are not like that. While the buns and trimmings are always very good, the patties are typically on the thin, gray, you-could-miss-the-meat-if-you-weren:t-paying-attention side. I’m now used to this, to the extent that when I actually ate a burger that contained no actual meat, I was oblivious until my dining companion pointed it out. This is a sorry state of affairs.

At One’s Drive, the whole assemblage at least tasted pretty good, despite the approximate vanishment of the patty. It came with a drink, fries (unfortunately, wedges) and onion rings (unfortunately, 4 of them. Fortunately, freshly-fried and AWESOME). It was Y990, which is pretty good for a burger set, and a lunch in Shin Maru. So I dunno – maybe you want to check it out sometime? I can’t promise you’ll be thunderstruck, but you could get by.

On da gween!!!
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