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Welcome to Haute-N-Ready, in which John Locanthi, Willamette Week's trencherman of leisure, tastes the hastily made, modestly priced food of the common man.
Perhaps no fast food chain has gone so far to distance itself from "fast food" as Wendy's. Dave Thomas square burger dispensary was in some ways at the forefront of the movement. It was one of the first chains to have a salad bar and sell healthy, pita sandwich alternatives. (Both went the way of the Dodo after Thomas kicked the bucket.) Earlier this year, Wendy's seized the Best New Food Item award at the first annual Haute-N-Ready awards with its Bacon & Blue Burger. Replacing lettuce with arugula was a power move in the effort to sell themselves as the artisanal fast dining establishment. This all brings us to this week's subject, the Gouda Bacon Cheeseburger with a side of Bacon Fondue Fries.
Wendy's has taken a staple of the fast food industry and added fancy cheese. Longtime readers will know that I'm no fan of the artificial cheese products that the American fast food consumer has an apparent affection (or indifference) toward. Wendy's is one of the worst offenders. It's attempt to hop on the ghost pepper bandwagon drown any and all burn with a cheese sauce. It sprinkles shredded cheddar cheese atop its cheesy fries to hide the nacho cheese below. Actually improving the quality of the cheese sauce—or "Swiss-Gruyere Fondue Sauce" to use the parlance of a restaurant trying entirely too hard—is an intriguing proposition. Also, gouda is good as hell.
The Gouda Bacon Cheeseburger will run you $4.99 a la carte. The Bacon Fondue fries are $1.99. A standard combo is $7.09 but you can replace the boring normal fries with the fondue fries for an additional 75 cents.
Between the garlic aioli, white cheese blend sauce and slice of gouda, this is an appallingly creamy cheeseburger. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. Spinach and other assorted greens play the role of mostly flavorless leaféd thing to make the burger look vaguely healthy, while the tomato adds a crisp refreshing character. Sliced red onion is used instead of white to further fancy it up. The brioche bun holds up fairly well even if the slices of bacon and other ingredients slowly slip out with the viscous cheese sauce oozing out.
While the gouda isn't able to fully separate itself from the mess of indeterminate bland cheese goop, it does stand out as a far better cheese for a cheeseburger. You find this with pepper jack cheese as well. When I last visited Zurich and wrote a column about McDonald's Suisse's exemplary McRaclette, I was bowled over but just how much better a fast food cheeseburger can taste when it chooses to use actual cheese. Pepper jack, cheddar, gouda, bleu, it doesn't really matter: they are all vastly superior to the standard American cheese.
But for a better taste of the "Swiss-Gruyere fondue sauce," I turned to the Bacon Fondue Fries. The only fondue aspects to the cheese is that it has been melted and consists of Swiss-sounding cheeses. "Swiss cheese" is more a name Americans use for white cheese filled with holes than any distinct style. Gruyere, on the other hand, is a very specific style protected by French law. (Note: I briefly stopped in the cheese factory when I visited Gruyere to see the H.R. Giger museum and get drunk on absinthe in the adjacent Alien-themed bar. I didn't eat any cheese, mind you, but I did buy a baseball cap with a cow shaped like a penis on it.) My palate isn't the most developed, but there isn't anything distinctive about the fondue sauce. It tastes eerily similar to the Swiss cheese you can find at any other fast food joint. It's bland but inoffensive, a marked improvement over the yellow cheese sauce Wendy's used to sneak into its cheesy fries. The dusting of bacon, burnt to a delightful crisp and crumbled, does its bacon thing.
In the grand scheme of things, the Gouda Bacon Cheeseburger is one of the finest things I've eaten for the column. The fries are less a triumph, but they are a solid bargain for only 75 cents extra with your combo meal. McDonald's has made some marked improvements in the quality of their burgers as they unveiled their "Tastecraft" line of burgers, but Wendy's is still the king of faux artisanal, fancy fast food burgers.
Willamette Week