Japanese Apple Mayonnaise Burgers Are Reportedly Not Gross At All

If someone offered you an apple cinnamon mayonnaise burger from a Japanese Burger King, you might politely decline. After all, at this point in your life, do you really need to go around sampling odd food combinations? (The answer is no, you’re old and stolid and have already reached your personal threshold when it comes to new twists on otherwise commonplace food.) Of course, if you turned down your chance to feel apple slices sliding down your mayonnaise-coated throat like little Olympic bobsledders, you’d be making a grave mistake. Perhaps the gravest of your life.

Burger King Japan has been offering two hamburgers topped with apple slices in lieu of tomatoes and coated with cinnamon mayonnaise. The burger is called the BK Ringo (“ringo” means “apple” in Japanese) or the NY Whopper (a bigger, Whopperized version), and it made a previous appearance in Japanese Burger Kings back in 2012. According to Rocket News blogger Casey Baseel, the apple effect is, surprisingly, pretty good:

The BK Ringo comes with a unique cinnamon infused mayonnaise, and a pretty generous portion at that. The cinnamon smells great, and the scent mixes with the meat and produces an almost Middle Eastern effect. It doesn’t impart as much sweetness as you’d expect, though. There’s a short burst of cinnamon flavor that comes just before you wrap your mouth around the sandwich, but once you bite in, the initial flavors on the tongue is mayonnaise, followed by the juicy meat and slight char.

Apple burgers might not be that crazy, according to the Consumerist, because, let’s face it — fast food tomatoes are usually sad, tasteless little testaments of humanity’s defiance of the seasons. The tomato’s unquestioned dominion on the burger must be stopped, if only so it can make a comeback in, say, 25 years when everyone’s sick of gross fast food apples and a bid by a Wendy’s in Germany to put flambéed bananas on burgers fails spectacularly.