Mos Burger’s new Niku Niku Niku Burger actually shows some restraint in its name, but not its ingredients.

Long ago, before moving across the Pacific, I heard someone say “In Japan, they use rice instead of bread for hamburger buns.” However, this turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration about life in Japan, much like the tales of orange juice costing 10 dollars a glass or Japanese people not liking desserts.

The vast majority of Japan’s hamburgers are served on bread-based buns. However, it is true that popular fast food chain Mos Burger also has lineup of “rice burgers” that use grilled discs of rice instead of bread, like the yakiniku rice burger pictured below.

But recently Mos Burger’s chefs began to wonder. If you don’t have to use bread to hold a burger together, why bother with any sort of plant-based bun? And thus was born the Niku Niku Niku Burger, which amazingly manages to undersell the amount of meat (“niku” in Japanese) that it contains.

To help visually process all that’s going on, Mos Burger has been kind enough to provide a schematic of how the sandwich is put together. Starting at the bottom, the Niku Niku Niku Burger ditches a bread or rice bun and instead starts with a straight-up hamburger patty. You know, the thing that’s usually supposed to be at the center of the burger, not it’s outermost parts.

Next comes a leaf of lettuce to keep the beef bun separate from the teriyaki chicken, more lettuce, a generous helping of yakiniku beef, one last lettuce layer, and, finally, yet another hamburger patty to top the whole thing off, making the Niku Niku Niku Burger actually four servings of meat.

▼ It’s basically a fistful of meat with some lettuce for color.

Now, while the idea of beef buns sounds like it’d be paradise for your taste buds, it might also sound like hell for your hands, since no one really wants to grip two slices of hot meat while they’re eating. Thankfully, the custom in Japan is to serve hamburgers wrapped in a paper sleeve, so you’ll be able to keep your hands cool and oil-free during your meal.

The 850-yen (US$7.65) Niku Niku Niku Burger is on sale now and will be available until June 27. While most of Mos Burger’s items can be ordered to-go, the Niku Niku Niku Burger is available exclusively for eat-in customers, presumably to keep packs of carnivorous animals from forming and following take-out customers home as they smell all that meaty decadence.

Source: Mos Burger via Jin
Top image: Mos Burger
Insert images: Mos burger (1, 2), SoraNews24

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he fondly remembers that his first SoraNews24 article ever was also about Mos Burger.