In an attempt to keep my dumb ass off twitter and away from election coverage in general, I have been running websites for fast food chains from non-English speaking countries through Google translate. And I have fallen in love. And also, must show you a sandwich
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This is the ‘Sunshine Green Grape Chicken Drumstick Burger.’ And it compels me. This strange little sandwich comes from the Chinese chain Dicos, something I had never heard of but, according to it’s wikipedia page, is one of the top three fast food joints in China, and also has some kind of incomprehensible beef with the NBA. Why is a Chinese chicken chain fighting with an American basketball league? Who can say. That is not why we’re here.
We are here for the grape burger. Which has compelled me for a few reasons. First and foremost is this: it is a limited edition item from a themed menu. This isn’t ‘oh look at this wacky foreigners putting grapes on burgers.’ What is happening here is so much funnier than that. Because, while looking at a bunch of Chinese fast food chains, I noticed a bunch of them have seasonal grape items. This must be a signature fall flavor.
Enter the Dicos grape menu. Look at that. Every single other grape item is a dessert. Mostly ice cream. And in a flash, we can envision the set of circumstances that led the grape burger into being. You are the menu developer at a chicken chain. ‘We are doing grapes for fall again!’ Your boss tells you. ‘Grapes’ you think. Grapes. You and your team come up with several delicious looking grape items. You send them to your boss. Your boss emails them back with one line, ‘Looks great but we need a chicken option.’
A chicken option?? With grapes??? You and your team are exhausted. You want to go home. You want to stop thinking about grapes. Eventually, one of your coworkers pipes up. ‘What if we just fuckin—put grapes on the chicken sandwich?’ A murmur rumbles throughout the room. Nobody has a better idea. You send it to your boss, hoping somewhere back in your lizard brain that this will get you fired and you won’t ever have to think about chicken sandwiches again. Six months later you see an ad on the train for the sunshine green grape chicken burger. The crazy bastards actually did it. You shake your head, and stare at anything else.
If this scene doesn’t make sense to you, think of it this way: this is like if Wendy’s came out with a huge line of various pumpkin spice frosties, and, inexplicably, a spicy pumpkin chicken sandwich. Someone lost the plot somewhere, and now you’re staring at it on a menu, puzzled.
In this way, the sunshine green grape chicken drumstick burger is no weirder than the Jimmy John’s picklewitch. Except there is no love lost between me and Jimmy John’s but Dicos? Dicos compels me.
Dicos seems to specialize in what I call the ‘sad chicken sandwich.’ This is not the best fast food chicken sandwich available. There are better ones, by miles. Dicos seems to be the place the lone contrarian in a group who wants to go to KFC, or one of the many other chicken sandwich places I found, would prefer. They look physically small, minimal toppings, you get the sense the patties are frozen. They seem to cater to the secret knowledge that some of us hold in our hearts: fast food is best when it sucks a little.
And I think that’s why the grape burger compels me so. I love sad chicken sandwiches. And I hate grapes. So much. I don’t like how they taste, their texture, that weird astringent, tingly sensation they leave that apparently is a grape allergy. And I can easily imagine a world where, though the cosmic lottery of luck, I was born in China, and retained most of my general personality traits, my grape hatred, my love of novelty foods, and the fact that I am a devotee of the sad chicken sandwich.
That version of me would be obsessed with Dicos, and so, so annoyed when this novelty item came out. It, like the picklewitch, looks hard to eat. It, like the picklewitch, seems like something someone in a corporate boardroom came up with despite never eating a sad chicken sandwich in their life. And through imagining this hypothetical life I never lived but could’ve, statistically speaking, I feel connected with those sad chicken sandwich devotees half a world away.
I know I get readers from China sometimes. Usually when reviewing weird sci-fi movies. But if you are out there: have a Dicos chicken sandwich for me. Just maybe not the one with the grapes.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 