When it comes to beef, there’s no more broadly beloved dish in Japan than the beef bowl, or gyudon , as it’s called in Japanese. Over on the other side of the Pacific, America’s flagship beefy meal is the hamburger, and by association its evolved form, the cheeseburger. Now gyudon restaurant chain Matsuya is arranging for a meeting of east and west with its newest creation the Cheeseburger Bowl/Cheese Burger Don.
This fusion menu item made its debut on November 12 at select Matsuya locations, and luckily one of them, the Shinjuku Sanchome branch in downtown Tokyo, happens to be very close to SoraNews24 headquarters. So when lunchtime rolled around, we headed over to try it for ourselves. The regular-size Cheese Burger Don we ordered is pried at 850 yen, but there’s also a extra-large version for 950.
Staring at the top of the stack, there’s a fried egg, a common topping for deluxe burgers in Japan. Underneath that is the cheese..
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.followed by the hamburger patty..
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.tomato sauce (playing the role of a hamburger’s ketchup)..
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.and, finally, vegetables and mayo, with a bed of rice at the very bottom. In other words, this is truly what you’d get if you took a cheeseburger, removed the top and bottom half of the bun, and then put everything else, still in a stack, on top of a bowl of white rice.
Honestly, we’re glad Matsuya went the simple route here. It’s just about the truest possible manifestation of the idea of a cheeseburger rice bowl, and we’d hav.